2
The air was fresh and sweet. They’d come down through a rainstorm into a mountain dawn and when Kikun emerged and looked around, crystal drops clung everywhere, picking up the sunrise, glittering red and gold and brilliant white. The local life was already recovering from the intrusion; there were grunts and whistles and a sudden soar of melody. Then the pattern repeated with changes.
He rode the lift down and walked into the middle of the meadow, absorbing shape and color, sound and smell, relaxing into this new world. The reprocessed air on the ship was clean and properly humidified, even faintly perfumed with touches of leaf and flower-choice air, one might say, pampered air. Despite this, it smelled of metal to him, as artificial as Ginny’s arm. He breathed deeply and his soul expanded.
They’d landed on the narrow isthmus that was the spine connecting the north and south nodes of Haemunda Chajiari, a sparsely populated area because the land was mostly vertical and stony, interrupted with steep narrow fjords where cliffs dropped a hundred meters straight down into the ocean water; the isthmus could support trees, grasses and small mammals, but a man would starve to death.
Kikun chanted under his breath, apologizing to the local life for the shock of the landing. Eyes watched from the treetops and the brush, looked up at him from the grass. Not much fear here, because no one came, just an ordinary wariness.
He settled his backpack more comfortably, leaned against a tree stump, and waited.
The lift hummed again. He turned. Autumn Rose was coming down with her pack leaning against her leg and two miniskips like hobbyhorses resting by her feet.
“Help me, Kuna,” she said when the lift reached the ground. “I want to run west with the edge of dark and we’ll miss it if we don’t start soon.”
He hauled his emskip onto the grass, shaking the icy dew over his feet and over its metal surfaces, then stood back, watched the lift rise, fold itself in until the skin of the skip was sealed tight once more.
“West by north,” Rose said. She touched on the effect, swung into the saddle. “Set the tonc at two seven four corrected. Got it? Good. Let’s go.”
They reached the Tola Hills above Tos Tous with dawn pinking the sky ahead of them, landed the emskips on a brushy ledge with a good ten meters of weathered stone rising above them and a drop over the lip of fifty meters straight down. Once the emskips were wrapped in a camouflaged groundcloth, it would take some hard looking to spot them; besides, as Rose said, who in their right mind would look there.
Despite the awkward weight of the pack, Kikun climbed the crumbly stone face like his looksake garden lizard going up a wall; Rose followed more slowly, grumbling all the way. She didn’t like heights, she wasn’t going to have any skin left on her front or her hands, besides she was freezing and starved. There had to be a better way, Z’ Toyff, there had to be. She reached up, Kikun caught her hand and helped her onto the flat above the cliff.
Tos Tous rambled around the curve of a wide lovely bay; the city was a quilt of many colors all of them gray or brown, thousands of small buildings gathered in haphazard clusters. No street-if they were streets, not merely gaps between adjacent buildings-went straight for more than a few meters.
“Lovely place. Anthill someone stepped on, squashed all to hell and gone.” Autumn Rose unfolded the map she’d had the kephalos print up for them, looked from it to the city below. “That’s the part we want.” She pointed. “There, near the middle of the curve where most of the wharves and warehouses are. Um. We’ll be going through the main market-if we’re lucky enough, and this is market day, you should be able to collect quite a lot of coin. Do the best you can, Kuna, we need the cash.” She chuckled, nudged him with her elbow. “You should be about the best pickpocket alive with that Talent of yours.” She sobered. “I can use my crecard in emergencies, but I’d rather not. I don’t know who or what’s watching readouts round here.”
Kikun sighed. “That’s the third time you’ve said that, Rose. I heard, I heard.”
“Nerves, Kuna. Always get ’em when I’m about to jump in something I don’t know anything about.” She frowned over her shoulder at the eastern horizon where the tip of the sun was poking up, a brilliant vermilion blob of light. “Twenty kays we have to walk. At least that. Well, better safe than sorry. Come on, Li’l Liz, let’s go.”
4
They reached the Tos Tous Highroad as a line of plodding bullocks walked past two by two, pulling carts piled high with raw leather and leather goods, the smell lingering long after they rounded the bend ahead.
There was a young boy on the back of each left lead bullock, whistling and tapping now and again at the withers of the pair, stirring them back to a brisk walk when they threatened to slow to immobility. These boys wore heavy bullhide trousers, bright wool tunics slit fore and aft, and long knitted scarves wrapped around their necks, the ends fluttering along the bullock’s sides. They turned to stare at Rose (not at Kikun; of course, they didn’t notice him) from large dark eyes in small brown faces, their straight black hair blowing in the wind.
A man and woman sat on a bench inside the last of the carts, he was stocky and bald and wrapped in a heavy overcoat; he gave Rose a single shrewd glance, dismissed her, and went back to watching his carts. The woman wore an identical overcoat but added a shawl over abundant black hair twisted into a high knot. She didn’t bother looking at Autumn Rose; her eyes were fixed on the back of the bullock boy, she was frowning at him, spitting words at the man beside her.
Ten minutes later a line of heavily laden flats hitched together and pulled by a motorized tractor came rumbling along the road, slowed to a sudden crawl as the tractor reached the last of the carts and couldn’t go round because there was a caravan of large hairy beasts plodding north along the highway, heading for the Landing Field.
Autumn Rose ran at the last of the flats, pulled herself onto the bed. It rocked under her and the hitch clanked loudly. The flats rode on a single wheel and tilted at a heavy thought. She waited, erect on her knees, until she was reasonably sure the trader hadn’t noticed he’d acquired a passenger, then she settled between two bales, leaned against a third, and sighed with relief as she stretched her feet out.
She started, made an exasperated spitting sound as Kikun plopped down beside her and stayed present in a way he hadn’t been for the past several miles. “One of these days I’m going to think I’m dreaming you, Li’l Liz, and go not so quietly crazy.”
An hour later the flats slowed again, crawling through scrapshacks and garbage dumps on the rim of the city. The dumps had a number of sluggishly burning fires producing a nose-numbing, eye-biting smoke that drifted in a bluish-yellow clots across the road. People crawled like dung-beetles over the discarded paper, rags and other junk, half obscured by the smoke clouds, grimly silent in their searches.
Kikun fidgeted nervously, his fingers moving in complex patterns Rose suspected might be counterspells or something similar. Finally he slapped his hand on the bale beside him. “Let’s go, Rose. Now.”