She shrugged.“I’ve not been here before.”
“Not been,” he squawked. “Not been to the famous market? The great market? The great market of Toila?”
“No.”
“Not been,” he said again, and Kate began to wonder if he was simple or mad. “No, not been. I would have seen you. I would have seen”—he smiled, and suddenly looked horribly sane—“such fine work.”
Plain Kate said nothing.
“Bit of a witch-blade, are you, girl?”
“A carver,” she said. “I’m a carver.”
“Objarka, though.” He raised his arms grandly, and the pewter things chittered all over his coat. “I sell objarka.”
“Not as good as mine,” said Kate. “But don’t worry. I won’t be back.”
“Don’t be,” he said. And he turned away.
“Hmph,” Kate snorted to herself. Taggle was a bad influence.
“He can’t keep you from here,” said the woman at the next blanket. She was selling round-weave baskets, and had a wickerworker’s hands, calloused and tough as roots. “The great market is free to all. And we need better charms than what Stanislaus sells.” She cast some sort of fingered curse at the departing back of the catfish man. “Objarka, ha! They’re meant to draw luck, but that man couldn’t draw bees with honey.”
Plain Kate, looking down at the terrible faces of her big objarka, felt herself smile.
“There you are,” said the woman. “You can see it yourself, surely. There’s no magic in his work.” She fingered her ear; the top was notched strangely, just where Drina had cut Kate. Was this a witch? “Pewter,” the woman sneered. “You can’t draw luck with tin. It needs blade.”
“I’m just a carver,” said Kate again.
The woman looked at her appraisingly, her fingers still pinching at her ear.“As you say.”
A bit later another man stopped. His zupan’s front was bright and stiff with embroidery. He looked a while, then stooped and picked up the pig-snouted face. “Luck! I’m not sure I would enter my own home, if it meant passing this fellow. What do you want for him?” And he gave her eight silver without even bargaining.
“That was the master of the threadneedle guild,” whispered the basket maker, when he was gone. “Now you’ll sell, wait and see.”
And indeed the stream of customers thickened around her, and people of all classes came to see her work, hefting the faces and running fingers over the smoothness of the carving. She sold four of her big objarka and made good silver. But then, suddenly, the crowd scattered, taking flight like a field full of starlings at no cue Kate could see. She found herself looking at a single pair of good boots and the hilt of a sword. She looked up at a man in the dress of the city watch.“We’ll have no witchcraft in the market,” he said.
“I don’t do any.”
“And your little friend?” said the watchman. For a moment she thought he meant Taggle, and her stomach lurched. She looked at the basket woman, whose eyes were wide with fear. “The lass with the pretty ways and little bundles,” he said. “The Roamer girl.”
Plain Kate swallowed and looked straight ahead. This gave her a good view of the watchman’s sword, bumping at his hip. “Well?”
But she could think of nothing to say.
“Have a word with her,” he said more kindly. “They burned a woman here last week.”
When he’d gone, Plain Kate tried to catch the basket woman’s eyes. But the woman, pale, turned her head away.
Plain Kate sat trembling on her bedroll with her three masks in front of her, and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and didn’t see Drina anywhere. She looked and looked. Her eyes lit on every flash of red, but none of them was the red turban Drina had been wearing. She tried to shout Drina’s name, and her voice caught in her throat.
People were still thick around her blanket, but now the glances were for her and not for her work, and some were hot, and some were cold. Plain Kate looked down at the objarka that had the face of a woman burning. She shifted her weight from foot to foot.
“Go find her,” the basket woman said. “Hurry.”
So Plain Kate snatched up her sleep roll and stuffed it, objarka and all, into her pack. She swung it up and ran into the center of the market. She found nothing but confusion. Wet cobbles skidded underfoot. Shoulders and elbows jostled her. Heads and handcarts blocked her view.
She scrambled up the steps to the platform from which the weizi rose. She’d been half expecting to see wood for burning stacked around the column, but there wasn’t, only the carved figures of the weizi itself: men unloading boats, a little too big to be human, their faces too narrow, their limbs too long. From the weizi platform she could see a little way. Somethingwas happening by one of the alleys. The eddying crowds had begun to flow in that direction. Kate saw the catfish man with the jangling coat heading that way, coaxing a priest along, a hand on the holy man’s elbow.
Plain Kate leapt from the platform and fought her way through the dung and puddles. A bridge from house to house made a wooden lip above the mouth of an alley. There was space of shadows beneath the bridge. In front of it was a wall made of human backs and shouting.
Kate heard a high screaming. The yowl of a cat.
Close by she heard the catfish man saying to the wheezing priest:“…the devil’s bundles, holy father, with my own eyes…”
The devil’s bundles, thought Kate.Drina’s charms. But she could see nothing but the tracks of the crowd.
Suddenly Taggle came scrambling over the heads and shoulders of gathered men. He left a trail of blood and cursing.“Katerina!” he yowled—though in the din only she knew it was him. The cat leapt onto her pack-basket, spitting, his hair stiff as a brush. “Katerina! It’s—”
“Shut up!” she snapped. Drina’s witchcraft charms. Her secret questions. “It’s Drina. Is she alive?”
“When I left.”
“What’s this, then?” said the little priest, but the men were packed so tightly that they didn’t—couldn’t—turn.
Kate looked at them desperately.“We have to get through.”
She could feel Taggle’s hot breath on her neck as the cat shifted on her basket, muscles bunching. “Follow me,” he said.
And before she could even think of stopping him, Taggle threw himself at the crowd.
His front claws bit into her shoulder as he leapt; his back claws grazed her ear. And then he was scrambling across the heads and shoulders of the packed people. His claws were out and his teeth were gnashing. He was huge with his hair on end, and screaming like a panther. The men—men he had already bloodied—shouted and squealed and hit and pushed against their fellows to get away from him. The wall of bodies cracked open. Plain Kate followed her cat like a soldier following his spear.
Elbows struck her. Feet tangled her. She stumbled and shoved through the hot press and the human stink. Something hard hit her temple. Another blow to her ribs. A stabbing weight on her instep. And then suddenly she was through. Panting, battered, terrified. But through. Into a little space bordered by the crowd, the walls of the alley, and a cart with a hysterical, rearing horse which blocked the way forward.
What she saw—
It was a flash of horror and blood like a moment from a dream. Plain Kate screamed even before Drina did. But screaming did not wake her.
She saw a man holding Drina by the hair. He was pulling her head back, as if to cut her throat. He had a butcher’s cleaver. He was butchering Drina’s ear, cutting it from the top downward. Blood everywhere. More blood than if he had cut her throat. A sick bright color. A slaughterhouse smell. Drina was screaming, screaming like a gut-speared horse. Kate was shouting. She had her little knife out and she charged at the man. Taggle ran up behind her, leapt up onto her basket, leapt past her, leapt straight at the man with the cleaver. He was gray and magnificent, an angel of vengeance. The butcher dropped Drina and shrank back. Kate caught her friend in one arm and spun around, pressing her against the wall. Drina folded down, ripped with sobs. Kate faced the crowd.