Half an hour later the Basith handed over one takk and five dugnas and received a bill of sale. He left the doulahar with the bill and Carup Kalan, took both to the Addala, did the paperwork and paid the manumission fee while the Tikkasermer stapled the bronze finnan into the girl’s left ear, signifying she was a freewoman. He delivered Carup and the documents to Brann, smiled with genuine pleasure as she thanked him and paid his fee. Then he went home to collect the gratitude of his wife.
Brann went back to being the Jantria, listening to women from the quarter and beyond, farther and farther beyond these days as her reputation spread, there were even a few wives from the lesser lsun, healing their bodies and doing her best to prop up their souls. It was draining, but she accepted it as the appropriate payment for the use she was making of the girl and for her bi-nightly prowls. Drinker of Souls was walking the streets of Dil Jorpashil. She came back sated and destroyed, swearing to herself she’d never go out again. But when the hunger was on her, she went.
Carup bloomed. She cooked, cleaned, sewed, she used a part of her meager pay to buy a chair for Brann, recaned the back and the seat, burnished the ancient wood until it glowed. She moved about the tiny house singing cheerful dirges, polishing the place until it gleamed. And she talked. Night after night, she consumed pots of tea and talked. And Brann listened. She nudged the girl now and then in a direction that would give her the data she needed about the workings of the doulahar; she didn’t have to nudge hard or often. No one had listened to Carup Kalan since she was weaned or showed her in any way that they valued her. Not even her mother.
Jaril was restless and irritable during this time, as fidgety as a dog with fleas. He went back again and again to the doulahar like a tongue to a sore tooth. He couldn’t keep away from it.
##
“The Chuttar left during the afternoon,” he told Brann, “in her fanciest litter, the ebony one with the silver mountings. She went up the hill to the Isullata sar. She’s still there, very entertaining she must be.”
“She stayed home tonight,” he told Brann another morning, “two Adals and a sorceror came by. They were there about two hours, then the Adals left. The sorceror was still there when I came away.”
##
“She went to the Market; she bought two slaves, a live bullock, some bolts of cloth. I don’t know why she went herself, maybe she was bored or something.”
And so it went. He watched the Chuttar Palami Kumindri day and night; overflying the doulahar far enough up to escape notice, staying over it twenty minutes at most with two to three hours between visits. He was cautious, but he could not keep away.
Days passed.
Brann acquired charts and lists and schematics of each floor, timetables, locations of all forbidden areas, everything she needed for a fair notion where the Chuttar might be hiding Yaril, everything she needed to get into the doulahar with a chance of getting out again, but she still had no plan for handling the smiglar. And no plan for Carup’s future. She had to have both before she could act.
Sambar Day.
She went as usual to the shrine and sat among the penitents and petitioners, surrounded by the slip-slap, click-clack of prayer beads rotating through work-worn fingers, the insect hum of the old women who came there because they had nowhere else to go, the rattle of drums and the chants of the celebrants as they did their best to sing Sarimbara deeper asleep.
Wreathed in incense drifting copiously from swinging censers as the celebrants made their hourly procession about the praiseroom, she cursed Maksim a while, but halfheartedly. Then she began to worry about him. Something must have gone wrong for him. That Jastouk? Little creep, he’d sell his mother for the gold in her teeth. That girl in Silili? What was her name? Kori something. Speculation was futile. And she had neither time nor attention to waste on him right now. Carup. She called up an image of Carup. If you ignored that mark and looked at her bone structure, her nose, mouth, eyes, she was almost beautiful. She was slim with wide hips and full breasts, the sort of budy men in this culture valued above all others. She kept herself covered, but Brann was certain the red-purple flesh was spattered the length of her body, neck to heel. Strip that away, though, and maybe her family would take her back. I wonder if I could do that? Well, Jaril and I. I can’t leave her here on her own, free or not. I might as well strangle her myself, it’d come to the same thing. I can’t do like Maks did with his Kori and put her in school somewhere. No Talent. No interest either. She’s bred to be some man’s wife. Dowry? That I can do. The skin, the skin, can I do ANYTHING about that mark? Jaril and I, we’ve done harder things. Yes. take the curse off her face. Can’t take it off her heart, can I. Takes more than magic to erase eighteen years of cringing.
A lanky boy with a shaved head came in, awkward and diffident, all bone and gristle, carrying a dakadaka under his arm, gray dust ground into the skin of his feet and knees, smeared over the rear folds of his bunchy white dhoti. He went shuffling to the raised area where Sarimbara’s icon was and dropped clumsily to the planks. He wriggled around, adding more stonedust to his person and his clothing, got his legs wrapped around the dakadaka and began tapping at its twin heads, drawing a whispery rattle from the taut snake-skins. Several older celebrants straggled in, men with shaved heads and orange dhotis; they sat in a ragged arc behind the boy and began a droning chant, a weary winding sleepsong for the god whose attention they feared more than his neglect. The visitors to the shrine, mostly women, added their wordless hums to the chant, filling the praiseroom with a sound like dry leaves blowing.
Brann hummed with the others, taking a break from the dilemmas that plagued her. She passed her prayer beads through her fingers, slip, slap, rattle-tattle, dark brown seeds fingerpolished to a mottled sheen, round and round, a soft, syncopated underplay to the drum, the song, the hum.
The day passed slowly, but it did pass, taking with it her hesitations and uncertainties. She went home to her hovel determined to peel off her problems one by one, Carup Kalan scheduled first to go.
9
Three days later.
Morning, about two hours before dawn.
Raining outside, little wind, water coming down in near vertical lines, the sort of rain that seems like it will never
100 JO t-layllfil end, as if the rest of life will be gray and chill and damp, the sort of rain that makes a pleasure palace of the most wretched of shelters as long as there’s a bit of fire to chase away the damp.
Brann pushed aside the curtain that closed off her bedroom doorway, edged around it into the cramped livingroom where Camp was sleeping. Her hair hung loose, a waving mass of white, fine as spidersilk; she wore her own face, young, unlined, her eyes green as new leaves, her mouth a delicate curve, soft and vulnerable. She wore a black velvet robe embroidered with gold and silver and rubies. Jaril stole it for her from the wardrobe of an Isu whose taste in decoration was so bad it was almost a Talent. He grinned as he held it up for Brann to inspect; when she said finally, I suppose bad taste is better than no taste, he had a fit of giggles that she shushed quickly, afraid he’d wake Carup. In her left hand she held a heavy wooden candlepole taller than she was and covered with tarnished silver-gilt that she’d been afraid to clean because the gilding was so thin it came off if you looked at it hard. There was a fat white candle impaled on the spike, but she hadn’t lit it yet. The only light in the livingroom came from the fireplace where faint red glows from last night’s fire seeped through the smother of gray ash.