Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction) (5 page)

2

Warreven

Lightning flickered beyond the
windows, too far away as yet to hear the thunder. Warreven counted
the seconds anyway, to fifteen, and then to twenty--more than eight
kilometers away, too far to worry about--then dragged his attention
back to the courtroom. No one had noticed the lapse: the judges--one
from each of the clans involved in the case and a man from the White
Watch to arbitrate--were still murmuring over their note boards,
heads close together, bodies inclined toward the center. Behind them,
the notice board displayed the particulars of the case in letters and
a machine-read strip for the off-worlders that flashed brighter than
the lightning. Warreven wasn't wired; he looked instead toward the
table where the brokers were waiting. Beyond them, he could see the
IDCA agents and their advocate, Dinan Taskary, punctiliously
respectful in his formal suit; they were technically the greater
danger to his client, but he was more concerned with the brokers. All
three of them--all men, or maybe the third, the slight one who wore
no jewelry, was only passing--were sweating, and that was a good
sign. They were all indigenes, Green Watchmen, two Maychilders and an
Aldman; if they were sweating, it was not from the heat, but from
worry.

Thunder grumbled, and
Warreven glanced again toward the window. The storm was getting
closer, a darker band of cloud shouldering up beneath the gray
outriders, blue-black against the orange tiles of the roofs of
Ferryhead on the far side of the harbor. As he watched, lightning
flashed again, a jagged, multi-forked bolt from cloud to ground. He
counted again and reached fifteen before he heard the thunder.

One of the judges
looked up at the sound, an older woman, dressed in an off-world shirt
and narrow trousers, but with strands of shell and glass beads woven
into her graying hair. She beckoned to the nearest clerk, and said,
"Lights, please."

The young man nodded
and crossed to the central podium, where he fiddled with the room
controls. The lights came up strongly, blazing to life in the
inverted bowls of the hanging lamps, and threw a distorted reflection
of the courtroom across the lower half of the window. The clouds
still visible in the upper half looked even darker by contrast.

Warreven stared at the
reflection, picking out his own image--common enough,
distinguishable only by position and by the loose mane of hair--from
among the line of lawyers and advocates and the brokers and
seraalistes
that
filled the spectators' seats at the back of the room. In the
imperfect mirror, the groups of people waiting for their cases to
come up looked like shapes in a kaleidoscope, the bright colors of
the indigenes' traditional clothes vivid against the duller
off-world palette. By contrast, the three judges behind their tall
bench looked like a painting formally composed, the triangle of
bodies leaning together over the one man's noteboard, blending,
through the brown arms out-stretched to balance the women on the
ends, with the polished wood below.

"Æ, Raven."

The voice was barely a
murmur, but Warreven winced and turned his eyes back to the
courtroom.

"Are you all right?"

Warreven nodded,
knowing perfectly well why the question had been asked, and made a
show of recalling something on his noteboard. The Stane judge, who as
the White Watch spokesman had ultimate authority over the court, was
a stickler for the proprieties and would be looking for an excuse to
throw the case to IDCA. Under the cover of the gesture and the
flickering text, he answered, "Sorry."

Malemayn--they were
both Stillers, and closer kin than clansmen, had been born in the
same
mesnie
--nodded,
and touched the noteboard's screen, highlighting a meaningless bit
of text. Warreven pretended to study it, and brought himself back to
the matter at hand. So far, they had succeeded in keeping the case
out of IDCA's hands--the Interstellar Disease Control Agency had a
deep and bitter interest in matters of trade--but they still had not
convinced the judges that their client, a Trencevent from the
Equatoriale, had been duped by the brokers and deserved his passage
home. He could still see Chattan, a thin, wiry herm who looked almost
convincingly male, sitting in their office, sea-scarred face
composed, only his knotted hands betraying his embarrassment as he
tried to explain his problem. The brokers had promised him a
sea-factory job, he said, but had told him it wouldn't start for
another week; in the meantime, they suggested, he could make quite a
bit more money playing trade for the off-worlders. Chattan had
agreed--though he was
not
,
he had said, lifting both hands for emphasis,
wry-abed
,
had only gone with people who called themselves women--but when the
week was up, there had been no factory job waiting. The brokers had
shrugged off his complaint: they had found him a job, after all; they
would neither return his fees nor find him something else.

Of its type, it was an
unusually easy case, Warreven acknowledged--trade wasn't a real
job by anyone's definition--but he couldn't afford to let his
attention wander, especially after his run-in with Tendlathe three
days before. Temelathe was vigorous, but he wasn't getting any
younger; it was important to get precedents established now, while
the Most Important Man could still be relied on to accept them as
part of customary law. Still, it was hard to concentrate in the
warmth of the courtroom, with the edge of thunder, the faint sharp
smell of the coming rain that seeped into the building through the
ventilators. He had always liked thunderstorms, had been born in one,
or so his aunts said, and even at his age the promise of a storm was
like a drug.

The judges settled back
into their places, and Warreven fixed his eyes on the bench.
Malemayn--he was the speaker for this particular case, as the most
traditionally acceptable of the three partners--rose to his feet at
the Stane judge's gesture. The brokers' advocate stood too,
expressionless, showing no sign of the defeat he had to expect, and
Taskary copied him at the IDCA table. Warreven touched the edge of
the noteboard, closing files, and then folded his hands over the
screen. The gray-haired judge--she was the Maychilder judge, closest
kin to the brokers--was watching him, and Warreven met her stare
without regret or anger. The brokers had a job to do, and a difficult
one; people lied to them, would say anything to get out of the
Equatoriale, if they were at the bottom of their
mesnie
,
or their kinship, or just hated knowing that in Bonemarche, not quite
two thousand kilometers from the jungle tracts, anyone could have all
the technology, all the luxuries, just for ready money. And people
lied to their advocates, too: he and Malemayn had learned early to
verify the stories of anyone who claimed they had been lured into
trade unwillingly. But this time, it was the brokers who had lied,
and Chattan deserved some recompense.

The Stane judge nodded
to the nearest clerk, who reached across to sound the court's bell.
It was metal, like the bells at the White Watch House, and its note
silenced the murmured conversations in the back of the room. Even
Warreven, who had heard it and other metal bells many times before,
shivered at the sound. In the sudden quiet, thunder rumbled.

"The court speaks,"
the clerk said. "Archer Stane speaks for the court."

"The court decides,"
Archer said, "that the Carrier Labor Brokerage, represented by
Langman and Richom Maychilder and Bellem Aldman, are required to
repay the fees paid to them by Chattan Trencevent. The question of
fares back to his
mesnie
is continued until after the Midsummer holiday."

"Mir Archer,"
Malemayn said, "Chattan is living in the Red Watch's holdfast
here in the city, he has no means--"

Archer shook his head.
"The case is continued," he said, and gestured to the clerk.
"Ten-minute break, Aldane."

The clerk repeated the
words, touching the metal bell again, and there was a rustle as the
people in the back of the room began to move, some turning back to
conversations, others moving forward as their cases were called.
Overhead the display board changed, announcing the next case.
Warreven looked instead at the brokers' advocate, who met his stare
with a bland smile.

"How much do you
suppose he... contributed?" Malemayn said, bending over the table
to collect his noteboard.

"More than we did,"
Warreven answered. Malemayn managed a sour smile at that, and behind
him, Warreven could see Taskary shaking his head as he joined the
other IDCA representatives. "The Stane
baanket
should be lavish this year."

"It had better be,"
Malemayn muttered, and turned away. They all knew how the case would
end now. The brokerage would return the original fee, and Chattan
would vanish, ready to pay his own money to be back in his own
mesnie
for the approaching Midsummer holiday. The brokerage would demand at
the continuation that Chattan appear, and--since it was unlikely
he'd return--the case would be dismissed for lack of a plaintiff.
Chattan Trencevent would get his money back, which was most of what
he wanted, and the brokers who provided the off-worlders with a
lucrative service weren't unduly embarrassed. It was, Warreven
thought, an elegant, if not an ethical, solution.

"We'll send the
voucher as soon as it's processed," the brokers' advocate said. "Will
tomorrow morning be convenient?"

Malemayn nodded. "Fine."

"I have every
confidence in you," Warreven said, and meant it. The sooner the fee
was returned, the sooner Chattan would head for the Equatoriale, no
matter what any of them said to him about court dates.

The other advocate
nodded in ambiguous acknowledgment, the hint of a smile just touching
his thin mouth, and turned away.

Malemayn sighed. When
he was sure the brokers and their party were out of earshot, he said,
"Well, so much for this one."

"We got the fee
back," Warreven said.

"True." Malemayn
glanced at the window and the massing clouds. "You want to catch
lunch in the district? I doubt we can get back to Blind Point before
that breaks."

Warreven nodded, and
they threaded their way through the crowd to the door. Outside, in
the wide hall, it was suddenly dark. Warreven blinked twice, and
nearly walked into a woman in full traditional dress. The hem of her
weighted skirt, heavy with shells and glass, slapped his shins, but
she was hurrying and did not look back. He made a face, and a tallish
person--male by dress, but as ambiguous as Warreven himself in face
and body--gave a sympathetic smile. Warreven smiled back, glad as
always of the odd-bodied's unpredictable kinship, and started down
the stairs to the central lobby.

The air smelled
abruptly of rain, the thread of breeze from the main doors suddenly
cool and cleansed. Malemayn muttered something under his breath, but
Warreven threw back his head, enjoying the change. The noon rains
would bring no more than temporary relief from the day's heat, but
even that was worth savoring, with Midsummer so near. Thunder rumbled
outside, along, sharp roll like the sound of a
tonnere
drum, and Malemayn said, "So much for getting in before the rain."

Warreven shrugged, and
pushed through the doors onto the narrow portico. It was raining, all
right, the big soft drops that preceded the main storm, and the
clouds were almost blue in the eerie dark. A breath of wind wound
around the columns that held up the roof, tasting of sea and storm,
licking at his skin like electricity. He suppressed the desire to run
out into it, down the five stairs that led up to the courthouse and
out into the open space of the plaza, and turned his face to the
clouds. A drop of rain struck his cheek, carried by the fickle wind;
he blinked, and lightning split the clouds overhead, a great streak
of light followed half a heartbeat later by the crack of thunder. He
stood dazzled, and someone ran up the steps into the shelter of the
porch, colliding with him at the top.

"Sorry--"

They had caught at each
other instinctively to keep from falling, and Warreven found himself
looking up into a handsome, bearded face. He smiled, and the stranger
smiled back and released him.

"That was close."

The voice was
off-world, as were the fair skin and hair. Warreven let go with some
reluctance, and answered in the off-world creole, "But off the
ground, anyway."

The off-worlder nodded,
and looked back over his shoulder at the clouds. He was breathing
hard from his dash across the plaza ,and his shirt was splotched with
damp patches the size of a child's hand. A few drops of water clung
to his neat beard, and some of his golden-red curls were flattened
against his skull. He was, Warreven realized, extremely handsome.

"Still too close for
me," the stranger said, with another smile that showed white and
even teeth--off-world teeth, Warreven thought, automatically. The
stranger nodded, still casually polite, and walked past him into the
building.

Warreven watched him
go, and Malemayn said, from the doorway, "Do you know him?"

Warreven shook his
head. "I wish I did."

"God and the
spirits." Malemayn looked quickly over his shoulder. "Do you
mind, Raven?"

"Anyone would think
you were wry-abed, not me," Warreven said. "There's no one
here, Mal. Relax."

"You should still be
more careful," Malemayn said. "What if one of the judges heard?"

"If they haven't
taken my license yet," Warreven began, and Malemayn shook his head.

"They haven't taken
your license yet because Temelathe likes you. Don't push it--"