Most of the people who had come to the market were clerks, low-grade administrators or record keepers dressed in crisp white shirts with high collars and baggy black trousers. Everywhere he looked, Yama saw a reflection of the fate his stepfather had wished on him. Most people made way for him as he followed Brabant through the crowded aisles, and some even touched the inky tips of their fingers together; Yama realized that they were deferring not to him but to the spurious rank lent him by his single bright firefly.
The whole brawling tumult, lit only by the restless sparks of the fireflies and the smoky wedge of sunlight, reminded Yama of the emmet nest Telmon had once kept pressed between two panes of glass. He suddenly felt a suffocating sense of the vast size of the Palace of the Memory of the People, its mazes of corridors, the stacks of offices and chambers and apartments of its hundred Departments, its thousands of temples and chapels and shrines, all silted with a hundred thousand years of history.
Mendicants were preaching here and there, but few in the crowds stopped to listen. A line of nearly naked men danced down an aisle, lashing their shoulders with leather thongs; at an intersection, a group of men in red robes whirled on the spot to the frenzied beat of a tambour. The hems of their robes were weighted, and spun out in smooth bells as they whirled around and around; their faces glistened with sweat and their eyes had rolled back so that only the whites showed. They would dance until they dropped, believing themselves to be possessed by avatars of the Preservers.
Amongst the stalls were shrines and altars where men paused to dab a spot of ochre powder on their foreheads and mumble a prayer or turn the crank of a prayer wheel.
Brabant stopped at one of the shrines, a glossy black circle framed by an arbor of paper flowers, and lit a candle and wafted its scented smoke toward his bowed face. Praying for the success of his traitorous errand, perhaps… or simply pausing for a moment’s devotion amidst his ordinary duties.
After Brabant had moved on, Yama stopped at the shrine and touched the coin hung from the thong around his neck, but the shrine did not light. The Palace of the Memory of the People was littered with shrines—Yama had found more than a hundred in the cavern of the Department of Vaticination—but he had not yet found one that would show him the garden where the woman in white waited for him. Perhaps it was just as well. He was not yet ready to confront his enemy again.
Yama pushed on until once more he glimpsed Brabant’s braided mane amongst the press of clerks and record keepers. The thrall seemed to know every other person in the market, and stopped at stalls to shake hands and exchange a few words with the merchants, or taste a sample of food.
He sat a while with a spice seller amongst aromatic sacks, and chatted amiably while sipping tea from a copper bowl.
Yama, watching from the other side of the wide crowded aisle, ate sugary fried almonds from a paper bag translucent with grease and wondered if the plot might be one of assassination by poison, or if Brabant was simply negotiating a good price for turmeric and mace.
Brabant shook the spice seller’s hand and got up and moved on through the market, saluting merchants, tasting samples and exclaiming fulsomely over their freshness, shouting greetings to passersby. If he was on a clandestine errand, he seemed to want everyone to know where he was; Yama’s initial small doubt grew stronger.
At last, Brabant reached the far end of the huge market and entered a corridor with three- or four-story houses on either side, like an ordinary street under a concrete sky.
There was more light here, pouring through a big curved window let into the ceiling at the far end, where palm trees rose from clumps of sawgrass. A flock of parrots chased from tree to tree, calling raucously.
A woman sat at a second-floor window of one of the houses, sleepily combing her long black hair. Below her, a man in a linen burnoose sat on a high stool outside the door. Brabant stopped to talk with the man, then shook his hand and went inside.
Yama walked past, suddenly feeling foolish and out of place. It seemed clear that Brabant had done no more than go about his business in the market before visiting a bawdy house for relaxation. Perhaps the thralls were one of those bloodlines which could mate at will, rather than on a particular day in a cycle or a season. Yet Yama was reluctant to leave. He felt that he should see this through to the end.
He drifted toward the edge of a crowd which had gathered under the palm trees at the end of the street, where a gambler restlessly switched three half shells around each other on a little table. Men in white shirts threw coins on the table, pointing at one or another of the shells, and when the betting was finished the gambler lifted the shells one by one, revealing a black pearl under the middle one.
He scooped up the coins, pressed a few into the outstretched hands of two of the spectators and pocketed the rest, then covered the black pearl and began to switch the shells back and forth again.
While the spectators made more bets, the gambler caught Yama’s eye and said, “I can’t allow you a wager, dominie. A man like you could ruin me in a single game.”
Yama smiled, and said that in any case he did not gamble.
“Then you may try your luck for the fun of it,” the gambler said. He had an engaging smile, and eyes as blue as cornflowers in a pale face. A single firefly crouched in his crest of red hair, as faint as the one which had followed the rat in the old entrance hall of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms.
The gambler took his hands away from the shells, and Yama, gripped by a sudden impulse, pointed to the middle one. The gambler raised an eyebrow and lifted the shell to reveal the black pearl. The white-shirted clerks around Yama groaned. The gambler took in their money, winked at Yama, and started shuffling the shells again. Yama watched closely this time, and it seemed that the shell hiding the pearl was again in the center—yet at the same time he knew it was under the shell on the right. The clerks finished laying their bets, and again Yama pointed, this time meeting the gambler’s smile with his own when the pearl was revealed.
The clerks murmured amongst themselves and the gambler said, “You see through my little illusion, dominie. Maybe you’d like to try your skill on something a little harder.”
“Perhaps another time.”
The gambler looked around at the spectators, as if calling upon them to witness his bravado. He said, “I’d only ask you to risk a copper rial on your skill. To a man like you that’s nothing, and you’d stand to win much more from me. I’ll give you odds of ten to one.”
Yama remembered the fierce leathery nomads who in summer came into Aeolis with their horses and hunting cats and tents of stitched hides to sell the pelts of fitchets, marmots, and hares they had trapped in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. The nomads’ dice games went on for days, drawing those who joined them deeper and deeper, until, from beginning with small wagers, they emerged as from a dream, dazed and penniless, sometimes without even their shoes and shirts.
“Your odds are too much in my favor,” he told the gambler, and some of the clerks laughed.
“They are in it together,” someone said. He was a tall boy not much older than Yama, flanked by two others as he pushed to the front of the crowd. All three wore enameled badges of a fist closed around a lightning bolt pinned to the high collars of their white shirts.
“I assure you,” the gambler told the boy, “that I have never seen this good fellow before.”