Street Magic (9 page)

Evvy shrank away from him. Even if he hit her, she was going to speak her mind. “If I show myself at the palace, they’ll, they’ll toss me in the cells of Justice Rock for not knowing my place,” she stammered. She went giddy with horror as her traitor mouth ran on. “Or they’d sell me. I’ve been sold once already - I won’t be sold again!” She dropped the bucket and covered her face. How could she have said that? She’d told no one that before!

When he said nothing, she peeped at him through her fingers. Whatever she’d expected him to do or feel, it wasn’t what she saw on his face now. What she saw looked like sorrow. Not pity - sorrow. “You’re a slave?” he asked softly.

“I ran away,” she mumbled. She didn’t want the Camelguts to hear this. The reward for an escaped slave would tempt them; she knew that it would.

“And the collar?” he inquired, his voice softer yet. “How’d you get rid of it?”

Evvy lowered her hands. “I broke it with a rock.”

Briar smiled thinly.

She guessed what he was thinking: more rock magic. “I thought it was a cheap collar,” she explained, almost smiling. “You don’t need a lot of iron to hold a scrawny piece of crowbait like me.” It was her old master’s favorite term for her. “You mean I had it” - she touched the corner of her eye in a sign that meant “magic” in Chammur - “even then?”

He walked over to a Camelgut girl who’d been seated, waiting for him. “You’re born with magic,” he explained. “It just gets frustrated if you get older and you don’t do anything real with it, so it breaks out.”

“Why can’t you teach me?” she asked as he began to wash the sores on the girl’s leg. “I already know you, and you know the rules and things.” What she didn’t, couldn’t, say was that she was comfortable around him. For all his pushiness and foreignness, she still felt as if she’d known him all her life. He was quick and inventive, as she’d learned to be, living on her own. She might vex and puzzle him, but never once had she seen pity in his eyes, even when she’d let slip that she’d been a slave. Never once had he treated her as a child, a female, or even a thukdak.

“I’m not a stone mage,” he said wearily. “It’s important that you get someone to teach you stone magic.” To the girl whose leg he cleaned he said, “You can’t scratch fleabites open like this - they get infected. Or if you do, wash the scratches out right off, with clean water - that means it’s been boiled. And soap if you have it.”

“Oh, sure, pahan” she retorted with a quick smile. “I left some under my pillow just the other day.”

Briar returned her smile, looking the rest of her over while he held onto her foot. Evvy smiled crookedly. So even pahans weren’t immune to the hug-and-kiss madness that swamped older girls and boys.

“Tell you what,” Briar said to the girl. “You know the aloe leaves they sell in the market?” The girl nodded, and tried to tickle the inside of his arm with her toes. “Behave, or I’ll put something that bites on these.” The Camelgut girl pouted at him prettily. Evvy sighed and shifted her weight from one foot to another. He was spending more time on swollen fleabites than he did on broken arms. “Steal some aloe leaves,” Briar suggested, “and when you itch, break a piece off and rub the juice on the itch. It’s good for burns, too.” Carefully he smoothed a salve over the sores and put a light bandage over them.

“Thanks, pahan” she said with another quick, sidelong glance from under curling lashes. “I’m Ayasha - if you have any more wisdom to share.” She got up and walked over to a group of Camelguts huddled in a corner.

Briar looked at Evvy, who was shaking her head. “What?” he demanded.

“You want a cloth to wipe the drool off your chin?” Evvy asked wickedly.

Briefly he looked the way she felt sometimes about her old home in Yanjing, lost and lonely. Then he shed the sad look and said tartly, “Keep making sour faces and you’ll need spectacles. It happened to one of my mates, it can happen to you.”

“What? You aren’t old enough for one wife, let alone more,” Evvy objected as she followed him to the pallets.

“Not my wife, my mate,” he said, blotting sweat from a sleeping boy’s face. “It’s a word we used at home, for somebody that’s closer than blood family, your best friend. Don’t you have mates?”

“The cats,” Evvy said. “Not people, though. I keep to myself.”

“Don’t keep saying you aren’t ganged up,” Briar replied, his face mulish. He rubbed one of his salves on the sleeping boy’s arm, above and below the splint. “I lived in a place a lot like Oldtown for years. All the kids were ganged up, unless they were crippled or simple. And you aren’t crippled, though sometimes I wonder about the simple part.”

“I’m no fool,” Evvy retorted softly, to keep from catching any Camelgut’s attention. How could someone as clever as he was not understand? Unless he told the truth, and he had belonged to a gang.

No, that was too outlandish. Old gang kids worked in inns, or peddled rags, or labored on farms or on buildings. They never became clean, well dressed anything. “Gangers always want this, and that, and some other thing. They’re your friend, and why can’t you help, and you’d be safer with us, and then they try to show you what you’d be safe from. Cats don’t want anything from me, though it’s nice if I feed them. I like that.”

Briar frowned at her. “The Vipers wouldn’t’ve grabbed you if you had a gang,” he pointed out.

“No, the other gang would have grabbed me first. Crabbing’s rude no matter who does it,” she retorted. “Let someone try it on you sometime and see if you like it.”

They made two more rounds of the room as Briar checked bandages, coaxed people to drink the sharp-scented tea he’d brewed, and gave out more medicines. Evvy watched him, fascinated. For all his fine clothes, he didn’t mind handling the sick, as if he’d wiped away sweat, blood, and vomit all his life.

He stopped at last and looked around. “I think we’re just about done,” he remarked.

Someone in the group of unhurt Camelguts in the corner yelled, “I can’t believe you! They killed Hammit! Pilib’s dead, now, too!”

Briar frowned. Evvy wondered why. He might be caring for these people, but their squabbles weren’t his.

“They’ll kill us all,” another boy argued. “If they don’t, you know Snake Sniffers and Rockheads will move in and pick us off. Look around! Half of us can’t even fight!”

“The Vipers have the takameri to buy weapons for them,” added Douna, the girl who had led Briar and Evvy here. “What’s she going to get them next? Axes? Swords?”

A youth added, “If she’s paying out that coin, I say she ought to pay it for weapons for us, too.”

Evvy was impressed. None of the gang people she knew had the sense to think of things like this. They were too tied up with honor and protecting their ground.

“‘They want us to join and I don’t want anybody else dying,” said a male voice. “Hands. For joining?” Most of the walking Camelguts’ hands rose. Other hands were raised as the kids in beds, those who were awake, cast their vote.

“Come on,” Briar told Evvy, disgusted. “I’d’ve fought till the end of time before joining a gang that killed a mate of mine. We’re finished here.” He waved to those of the gang who looked at him, and led Evvy out into the open air.

She followed, dazed. Was it possible she’d been wrong, that he really had belonged to a gang once? That was just the kind of thing she’d expect a gang boy to say.

It was the first time that Ikrum Fazhal had visited Lady Zenadia doa Attaneh’s home before sunset, but she had ordered that he was to come the moment there was word on the Camelgut matter. As her expressionless servants admitted him through the tradesmen’s gate and led him to the patio and garden where the lady usually saw him, Ikrum wondered what they made of her interest in thukdaks like the Vipers. He could tell that they were as much in awe of her as he was, or they would have found their own ways to end his visits.

They left him standing before the couch where she usually sat. They had placed a pitcher of wine, a cup, and a bowl of fruit there for her. Ikrum was not even tempted to help himself. The one time he’d been so bold, he’d discovered that she carried a thin, bladed crop in her expensive draperies. It had left a broad scar across the back of his right hand, right between his Viper initiation scars.

Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if he and some other Vipers hadn’t mistaken her for an overpriced prostitute wandering the Grand Bazaar one night. They’d grabbed her and dragged her into a nook between closed stalls, meaning to strip her of her jewels and her silks. Instead they had discovered her shadows, the armsmaster and the mute, and the lady’s own tiny dagger, which she laid against the big vein under Ikrum’s jaw. He had thought he was dead. Then he had told her, “Cut hard and fast and get it over with,” and she began to laugh.

She liked his courage, she had said. She took him to a shop that sold coffee, buying him pastries and cups of that bitter, expensive drink. Her armsmaster and the mute sat Ikrum’s friends on the carpets in front of the shop and kept them from running away.

Terror-sweat poured from his body when he had learned that she was the amir’s aunt, a lady from one of the great noble houses. He saw his headless corpse and those of his friends dangling from Justice Rock. Instead of calling the Watch, she asked about him and the Vipers.

She asked and listened so well that Ikrum found himself telling her his troubles. He even talked of the slight he had been dealt by the city’s richest and most powerful gang, the Gate Lords, who held all the territory between the Grand Bazaar, Golden House, and the Hajra Gate. Ikrum had foolishly fallen in love with the sister of the Gate Lords’ tesku, or leader. The tesku had told Gate Lords and Vipers alike that he would never allow his sister to go with the tesku of a pack of glorified errand boys.

“I like you, Ikrum,” the lady had said on that vital night. “You are no dirt-person. You have ambition, courage, pride. I will help you.” She had left with orders for him to report to her house the next day around sunset.

He had gone, because no one could refuse her. He had expected that she had lied about her address, or that she had been drunk and had forgotten all about him. Neither was true. The mute had taken him to the garden after checking him for weapons. The lady waited for him there, with plans to make the Vipers great.

“I’m bored,” she told Ikrum. “My children are grown, my husbands dead. I wish no other husbands or lovers. My grandchildren are tedious. It suits me to help the Vipers to greatness, if they can make the journey. If they can accept discipline. If you cannot - “The lady shrugged. “I will find another way to amuse myself. We begin by giving your people a better sign of fellowship than that rag.” She pointed to Ikrum’s gray armband. “And we shall make the new token one it requires courage to get.”

“Stand still,” the lady had remarked sharply. “Will you disappoint me already?”

Ikrum obeyed. The lady’s healer moved in to pierce his left nostril and thread the brass ring with its garnet pendant into the opening. Only Ikrum got his piercing and nose ring from a healer. The other Vipers got theirs from Ikrum, who added the ring supplied by the lady and a dab of ointment that both cleaned the hole and stopped its ache.

The lady did not end her interest in the Vipers with presents of jewelry. Time after time the mute came to their den with her gifts: tunics, clean and in good condition, trousers or leggings, skirts, slippers, knives, food, coins for the hammam. Clean, wearing better clothes, the Vipers could enter the Grand Bazaar and Golden House in ones and twos, spying out targets for theft and taking them as they left the souks at night. Looking more prosperous, they were hired to deliver more messages and packages, which let them scout homes and shops to rob once the residents had forgotten the messenger boy or girl with the nose ring.

He’d thought for weeks she would tire of them eventually, until he realized the opposite was happening. The more reports he brought to her of successful thefts and robberies, of the small enlargements to their territory just south of Golden House, of fights they’d won, the greater her fascination. Her reactions to their setbacks grew more heated, as if disrespect of the Vipers was disrespect of her.

Ikrum sighed now, and scuffed the courtyard tiles with his foot. He was never sure if he was glad the lady had taken them up. The sister of the Gate Lords’ tesku was still forbidden to him. Viper life was more dangerous. Sometimes the lady frightened him.

And weren’t the tiles blue yesterday? Today they were red. Uneasy, he spat on his hand to rid himself of unpleasant ideas, then carefully wiped his palm inside his trouser pockets. The lady did not like it when Vipers spat.

“Ikrum, you are early,” she said, walking out into the sun. “I hope you have no disasters to report.” She sat on her couch gracefully, veils floating cloudlike around her. Her skirts, sari, and head veil were dull gold today, her short blouse a pale orange. Ikrum went to his knees, then lowered his forehead until he was a hair above the red tiles. For some reason he didn’t want them touching his face.

From here he could see that gilt designs were pressed into the leather of her slippers. A heavy gold ring cupped one of her ankles. She wore bracelets, too, heavy earrings, and a chain hung with canary diamonds between her nose and left ear. Why did she care about their thefts, when she wore more jewels than they might ever steal?

She reminded him of a goddess’s golden statue - not Lailan of the Rivers and Rain, who was draped in blue and green and whose kindness shone form her face, but some eknub goddess, some distant queen of the skies. How could he worship and hate her at the same time? Ikrum wondered feverishly. Was it possible to feel two different emotions for someone? Fear and hate he knew, or he’d thought he’d known them before meeting her. But worship, admiration … Orlana accused him of being in love with the lady, but the thought made his skin creep. He wondered if her husbands - she’d had two - had died of natural causes. His private nightmare was that she had bitten their heads off while embracing them.

She left him with his forehead to the ground, waiting for her maid to arrange the cushions at her back and to pour her a cup of wine. Once the maid had crossed the garden to a point where she could see if her mistress wanted her but could not hear, the lady ordered, “Report.”