TWENTY KURIES THE NIGHT
The Rumach was as shabby as the rest she’d looked at, so far, with worn, weathered shakes on the upper floors and salt stains on the shutters, but there was a vigorous vine growing about the door with trumpet-shaped crimson blooms nodding in the brisk wind off the, water behind her, water glittering between two warehouses on the far side of a space that was more like a street than any she’d seen in this place, its form dictated by the water’s edge one line of buildings away.
She considered the Rumach. The flowers were nice, the touch of color appealed to her, it was the first she’d seen on the outside of any house. She curled her toes inside her boots. There was a burning on her heel where a blister had burst, she knew it had, she could feel skin moving with each step. Goerta b’rite, if this Rumacha is marginally less a sleaze than the other oof’narcs I’ve talked to so far, this’ll do.
She climbed the short flight of stairs, tugged at the stag-hoof that served both as bellpull and signifier.
The woman who opened the door was tall and lean, with a cloud of tightly curled white hair and a face carved from dark chocolate. Offworlder and female. Rose sighed with relief. “I’d like one of those rooms you’re advertising,” she said, “I’ll be here several weeks.”
Rose shut and locked the door, tossed the key on the bed, shrugged out of the backpack and dropped it on the floor next to a large overstuffed chair with a blue throw on it sewn from the silky cloth she’d seen in the clothing of many of the women. She yawned, threw herself into the chair and sat a moment running her hands along and along the padded arms, relishing the cling and slide of the brilliantly colored material. Then she bent, jerked off her boots, tossed them aside and scrubbed her feet back and forth on the rug, braided from more of that cloth, green and red and purple and bright blue. The room was shabby and well used, but clean and comfortable and pleasant on the eyes, furnished by someone who had a love for color and the strength of personality to force order out of exuberance.
There was a saggy double bed with crisp white sheets and a pile of quilts. A table beside the bed with a lamp and a blotter and stylus, a ladderback chair pushed in under it. Next to the table was the room’s only window, deeply recessed with a cushioned window seat built atop a chest. Kikun was sitting there, nested, among the pillows.
Rose gasped, blinked. “Hello, Li’l Liz,” she said finally. “Um… can’t you fix it so you don’t do this to me every time? I could drop dead with a heart attack.”
The folds of skin on Kikun’s face shook with silent laughter.
Rose unlatched her belt, pulled it from around her, tossed it on the bed with the key. “I picked up ten emas, two hundred peras and a handful of kuries for the junk I brought off the ship. How much did you get?”
“I haven’t counted it yet. Let’s see.” He dumped his sac on the cushion, began arranging the coins. “Hmm. One hundred coppers to one silver, one hundred silvers to one gold, right?”
“What kephalos set the assayer to.”
He swept the coins back into the sac, announced the total. “Fifty emas, three hundred peras and about a hundred kuries. And a handful of offworld coins, no telling what they’re worth, I don’t recognize any of them.”
She yawned. “Z’ Toyff, I’m tired. Hungry, too, but I don’t feel like moving.”
“Trailfood in your pack.”
“I know. I’ll dig it out in a moment. Kuna, you going to be all right here? This doesn’t look to be a good world for outsiders and you’re more outside than most.”
He shrugged. “I’ll get along.”
“Well, take care, I’d rather have a disappearing dinhast than a decaying corpse.” She yawned a third time. “I think I’ll get some sleep. It’s been a long day. Tomorrow’s soon enough to begin winnowing out our targets.” She groaned, pushed onto her feet. “You want the right side or the left?”
“Huh?”
“The bed, Kuna. What’d you think I meant? There’s one of it and two of us. Which reminds me, I’ll have to get a key cut for you tomorrow, I don’t think I’d better ask the Rumacha for an extra. So, which is it, right or left?”
“I don’t like walls. Let me have the outside.”
“Good enough.” She stretched, groaned again, shook herself and started breaking open the fastening on her shirt. “If you wake first, Kuna, shove me out. I’m so tired I could easy sleep till next week, but the sooner we start looking, the sooner we’ll know…”
Shadith (Kizra) In The Halflight
1
A blood halitus sweet and musty spread through the room as the Irrkuyon on the dais stood without moving, a tableau that held until Rintirry dropped the knife on Kulyari’s body and strolled to the end of the table. He flung himself into his chair, poured a dollop of wine into his glass, and gulped it down.
MEMORY:
She turned a corner, found herself in the middle of a kidnapping.
Before she had time to react, one of the men had an arm wrapped around her and a slicer against her temple. “Move and you’re dead,” he whispered. His breath was hot on her ear, she was pressed hard against him; he wasn’t much taller or wider than she was, but she kept thinking of steel traps and sword blades and other hard and lethal things. Lethal, yeh. He wanted to kill her so badly she could smell it like body odor.
Matja Allina exchanged a quick look with Airing Pirs, got to her feet. She signaled the women at her table to follow her, then went sweeping from the room.
Behind the screen Kizra clutched at the arranga and wondered what she should do. Danger was as thick in that huge room as the blood-stink off the body. She wanted out of that place now, no! ten minutes ago.
Fragment by fragment, since the encounter that afternoon with that signifier lizard, she was reassembling her past and with that past regaining an acerbic view of power and the powerful, a view underlined by what had just happened, a lesson of what would happen to her if she followed her natural tendencies in this world.
The door whooshed closed behind him, expanding as it moved to fill the whole space of the opening as if it erased itself to underline the futility of trying to escape the cell. Hands clasped behind her, Shadith scowled at the seamless wall. “Mashak! Dafta!
Your soul smells like dog-shit.” When she was trapped in the diadem she was essentially immortal. She’d abandoned all that when she had Aleytys decant her into this body.
I must have been out of my alleged mind.
That struck her as funny and she giggled, but the spurt of humor was quickly gone. Time meant more now. The idea of wasting her counted hours in a hole like this one with nothing to see, nothing to do, made her wild.
She closed her eyes and reached, searching for other eyes, single or compound, large or small, anything she could look through. Somewhere, somehow, he must have left a crack she could worry at until it was big enough to let her crawl out of this.
A small dark maidservant slipped like a shadowmouse from the curtains behind the screen and touched her on the shoulder. Ghineeli chal. When Kizra started to speak, Ghineeli touched a forefinger to her lips. Then she beckoned urgently, pointed at the curtains.
MEMORY:
She came painfully awake, looked up into the liquid copper eyes of the sauroid captive. She was lying on a floor somewhere and he was kneeling beside her. She wasn’t tracking too well, whatever Ginny used to put her out seemed to have pushed the slow-button in her head. She rubbed at her eyes, groped around with numb hands.
Kizra followed her out into the kitchen hall. “What…” she whispered.
Ghineeli shook her head, then went scooting along the hall to the swinging doors at the far end. She pushed open the lefthand door, stood holding it until Kizra was through, then she eased the door shut with no more noise than a faint whoosh. She touched Kizra’s arm. “The Matja said go to her rooms. Now. By the serving stairs.”