The silvered szuldar lines on Ariella’s face flashed. Her deep blue eyes sparked gold, and Cephas realized he was seeing the reflection of his own glowing pattern in her gaze.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you still can.”
Chapter Ten
If this room is all you have seen of the world,
how did you measure its width?
This is what Corvus owed humans. Humans invented cities, and cities cast shadows like no other places in the world.
When he stepped through the portal from Argentor, Corvus had noticed that it did not raise the feathers at the back of his neck. The ritual lacked the particular frisson the WeavePasha lent to his magics.
He’s left this to one of his vizars, thought Corvus, and he was not displeased by the realization. If Acham el Jhotos had turned his attention to some other of his innumerable plots, then he would not be there to greet them. This meant Corvus would not have to play peacemaker while Mattias and el Jhotos circled each other like a pair of Durpari fighting cocks, a fine thing.
And it meant Corvus would be able to slip out into the city without figuring a way to best the old wizard’s personal warding magics, an even finer thing.
Corvus considered whether or not to tell Mattias he was going out scouting, but he rejected the thought when the ranger scowled at his approach. Corvus understood. The deaths of their companions in the circus meant it would take the old man longer than usual to come back around to their usual choppy state of relations. Faith, trust, loyalty-perhaps even that flavor of love that humans called brotherhood-tied Mattias and Corvus together. None of them made Mattias comfortable simply being around his old friend-not all of the time, and certainly not when others of their friends were dead and Mattias had a more than reasonable notion that Corvus’s activities as a spy for hire were partly to blame.
Instead, Corvus told Shan he was going out into the city. As he expected, she expressed a desire to accompany him, and, as usual, he told her no. The halfling sisters could walk unseen from Almraiven to the Sea of Moving Ice, but their gifts were better utilized in wilder settings.
Aside from that, Shan had lately shown an increased flexibility in her choices that troubled Mattias with the increased ferocity it lent her. It devastated her sister. Corvus saw no reason to encourage this slow tilt in Shan’s moral compass, not yet at any rate. There was no need to further disturb the emotional waters of their already fractious little family.
And it wasn’t as if the troupe needed a second assassin.
The WeavePasha, Corvus knew, had taken the first tentative steps in a project the old wizard described as societal husbandry. His intention, laid out in a nested set of plans that had timelines running to centuries, was nothing less than the complete restructuring of Almraivenar society.
The governmental and social structures, the ways of doing business and taking pleasure, the institutions of magic, faith, and slavery that supported the city’s way of life, everything, the WeavePasha claimed, was anathema to the city he wanted Almraiven to become. Better than most, Corvus knew where the roots of the southern port’s ways and mores lay-in the society the Great Djinni Calim led onto the world nearly eight thousand years before. For all the grandiose claims the old Calishite writers made about their ancient civilization-and grandiose claims were the particular specialty of Calishite scholarship-almost nothing about it was the invention of humans.
The Almraiven of the WeavePasha’s imagination, though, the shining exemplar of human achievement that was the end of the wizard’s grand ambitions, and which, on more than one occasion Corvus had assured him was an absolute impossibility, was an Almraiven free of djinni influence.
The aspect of Almraivenar life that most closely resembled life in the genasi Emirates of the deeper desert, and which was most unlike the other greatest human cities, was the simple fact of slavery.
Corvus understood that slaves toiled and died in every city of the Realms, but few of those cities, indeed, were places where the practice was deemed legal, much less acceptable, as was the case in Almraiven. Even rarer were those places that celebrated the practice, as was the case in Calimport and its client cities, and in far Memnon and the other places where the efreet and the southern firesouled held sway.
Slavery was an undeniable fact of life in the City of Spells, and should the WeavePasha’s plans ever bear fruit, at some distant and unlikely point, it was the fact of life that would have the greatest impact on the city in its changing.
Slaves fed the city and clothed it. Slaves fished its waters and cleaned its streets and, in an aspect that mystified visitors from elsewhere, slaves even guarded the city as the backbone of its militia. Slaves even filled out the lowest ranks of the city watch.
The WeavePasha made much of the fact that Almraiven, alone of the Skyfire Emirates, was a human city. But Corvus believed that for those who lived as slaves, the difference between being in a city ruled by humans and a city ruled by genasi was not that great.
Corvus could not imagine Almraiven without slaves. He thought it likely that the WeavePasha, a man known to have bested a Duke of Hell in single combat, would see his reign ended not because he provoked the ire of enemies without, but because he held a radical opinion that his subjects within would never tolerate.
“Almraiven without slaves,” Corvus mused again, this time whispering. There were none in the fetid alleyway to hear the revolutionary idea. Through the gloom, Corvus could just make out the trench dug at the base of a sagging brick wall that was no doubt older than some gods. A familiar, foul smell floated up from the trench, confirming for the kenku that he had not forgotten the way. Steps were cut into the jumble of old stones that lay beneath the streetscape, remnants of past Almraivens.
A thin line of light appeared below, as a poorly hung door was forced open long enough for a figure to dump a bucket of something mostly liquid at the bottom of the steps.
Corvus put thoughts of the WeavePasha’s mad dreams out of mind. No slaves in Almraiven-who would drink at T’Emma’s?
T’Emma was a gnoll who had managed the minor miracle of growing to adulthood as a runt among those fierce, jackal-headed folk. Corvus had never met a more foul-tempered or sharp-tongued woman. Neither had he ever seen her anywhere but lounging behind the length of a broken ship’s mast that served as her bar. How the mast was brought to the dugout basement tavern was a minor mystery compared to how such a tavern, owned by a gnoll and serving a clientele of slaves, came into existence in the first place. But exist it did, and it had for thirty years that Corvus could bear witness to.
The gnoll woman did not acknowledge him even after he laid his heavy purse on the stained wood. As usual, she was interested in speaking only to herself.
“There’s that kenku again. He’ll want to know things that are none of his business. He’ll have a lot of coin.”
Corvus said, “I seek word of any agents of the djinn of Calimport in the city.”
“He didn’t even order a drink,” said the taverner. “Every time, he just starts right in like he don’t know he has to order a drink.”
“Yes,” said Corvus. “He always puts it off as long as possible, because he knows that once he orders it, he’ll also be expected to drink it.” He waved a hand at the barrel behind T’Emma.