Standing at the rail, waiting to go overside, Shadith was surprised by the look of the town spread along the horns of the bag, rising up the slope of the mountain behind, street lanterns of translucent shell hung on high poles, shining pale green pale amber on fogwet pavement. It was a larger and more complex settlement than she'd expected, her notions colored by the feudalism of the Main. Atehana, Lipatchin called this place. Atehana on the island Wakisoe.
The Tipli Lipatchin decanted his passengers with obvious relief and upped anchor as if he'd put into a plague port.
A group of locals, mostly men, a small knot of women to one side, waited for the two boats on the central wharf; the Tipli had been on the corn with the island for the past two hours, exchanging cryptic clipped phrases with them, spaced at longish intervals. The aura of wariness and secrecy was thick enough to cut.
As the first longboat nudged against the piles and two of the rowers locked it steady with boathooks, the locals lowered a sling. Rohant and the doctor eased Asteplikota into it and steadied it as the men working the davits drew it up.
The boat Shadith was in swung up against a ladder and two of the rowers hooked it in place while she and Kikun got their gear together and hauled it up the ladder onto the wharf. She thought the cats were going to be a problem, but the moment she and Kikun were clear, Magimeez batted Nagafog out of her way, leaped from the boat, hit the ladder, crouched and sprang, flying onto the wharf; Nagafog landed beside her a moment later. They sat on their haunches grinning at Shadith. She grinned back, then strolled over to watch as a small group of the locals transferred Asteplikota to a stretcher on wheels and went running off with him. She backed up against Rohant. "We need to talk," she muttered.
He touched her hair, his hands were hot and trembling. "I'm at the end of my string, Shadow."
"All right, but I have this, feeling. We wait too long, we're going to be so bogged down we'll never get loose."
A young woman with, fine blonde hair floating like fog about her face and shoulders broke from the small crowd of locals and came across to them, followed by two other women, both of them considerably older than she was.
She flickered a smile at Rohant and Kikun, then turned its full glow on Shadith and held out her hands. "Singer, one is… I am Uiaras your servant, of the House of Judge Wakisoe-Matwesie. It's very late, you must be exhausted. Come, a bath and a meal and a bed and you'll feel more like you're alive."
The invitation was for her alone and she didn't like the idea of being drawn away from Rohant and Kikun.
Kikun touched her arm. "Go on, twiceborn. Tomorrow's soon enough to start again."
"Meet here?"
"Here it is."
A wave of warmth ran through her; this time she didn't bother wondering where it came from, she needed it too badly. "All right," she told the woman. "I must admit I could use a bath."
The Woman's Hostel was halfway up the mountain, a large dark bulk built from the same fieldstone that, cracked and set in concrete, paved the streets. Its fogwetted, precipitous roof glistened in the starlight, rounded slices of slate overlapped like the scales of a fish, punctuated by half a dozen chimneys putting out threads of fragrant smoke. Golden lamplight glowed through the intricate stone lace that filled the pointed windows ranked on both sides of an open, ogeed archway cut into the wallstone with a massive bronze door at the end, its patina shimmering greenish gold in the light of twin lanterns of shell and bronze. Stone everywhere. Appears to me this place has more rock than trees. Come the winter, what you bet it's cold as a ottogyne's finger.
At the foot of the wide shallow steps leading to the entrance, Uiaras touched Shadith's arm. "Wait here a moment, it's late, they want you, but they'll want to make sure it is you." She smiled suddenly, the high-voltage grin that did a lot to convince Shadith to come with her. "Don't worry, I won't be long." She ran up the stairs and into the entranceway, punched a wide button beside the door. A hatch opened in the wall beside her and the shadow behind the grill murmured something. It was a woman's voice. Shadith couldn't make out the words.
She slid the strap of the harpcase off her shoulder and eased it to the pavement, then turned to the woman beside her, the one who carried her travel pouch, a short, square figure with coarse silver hair and an ugly-attractive, intelligent face. "Is it always this difficult?"
The woman looked startled, then smiled tentatively, her gray-blue eyes sinking into a nest of laugh-wrinkles. "Curfew," she said. "Uiaras," a wave of a small hand at the blonde woman arguing with the grill, "and we," another wave that took in herself and the silent woman beside her, "we generally do not stay there." She ran fingers over the bracelet on her left wrist, silver shaped into a broad band, inlaid with copper wire and turquoise beads, the design a bird form curved about a cat. When she saw Shadith looking at it, she said, "My marriage band." There was both pride and sadness in her voice, her face. "Do you know the custom? No? Ah well, no doubt you'd discover it soon enough. One wears, A! I keep forgetting, I… I wear the band on my left arm because I am cast off; my liwa, he repudiated me for a younger woman, one… I had no sons, you see, only daughters; I live here with my youngest daughter and her lover."
Shadith shifted uneasily from foot to foot, embarrassed by this unasked-for soul-baring.
The woman shook her head. "Don't waste your time on pity, Singer, I much prefer this life." Her eyes gleamed with laughing malice. "And with a little luck I'll see my exla skinned; he's the head of the Nistam's Guard. Such a lovely man he is, the charm of a rabid amskir with the intelligence of a gnat. The Pakoseo works for us; even if the other Nistams come against us afterward as they always do, we'll hold Wapaskwen long enough to make a sweep of the bloody landlords and their lackeys of which my exia is the chief. Word is you are Nikamo-Oskinin, the ninth incarnate."
"Don't believe everything you hear, especially nonsense like that."
"I don't, you know. Nonsense?"
"My word on it."
"But could you tell? No no, don't bother answering. It doesn't matter what you are, only what people think you are."
Shadith opened her mouth to repudiate that, then closed it again. The woman was right, people would most likely believe what they wanted to believe, no matter what she tried to tell them. She sighed, shivered. Her clothing protected what it covered from the chill wind sliding down the mountain, but her ears and nose were losing all feeling; she glanced at Uiaras, then at the woman beside her. Try again, old Shadow, if you can get one to buy it, maybe the word'll spread.
"My name is Shadith; my people are dead, my guardian was sending me to University to study music when all this.." running through the familiar litany with no more energy behind the words than she could find for them last time, she swept her hand in a looping gesture meant to take in the world and the events that brought her there, "… happened. Listen, my being here means nothing. It's chance, that's all. I have no connection with any of you or with this place. The others either."
The woman patted.her arm. "Yes, yes," she said, mama soothing the hurt and angry child, slipping the child's words into the internal wasteslot adults kept for such things. "One… hah! habit, oh habit, sad habit. I am Kati Mola."
Shadith blinked. "Mola? If I hear right, that means no one."
"It's the name my daughter took when she left her father's home." She smiled again, more easily this time, a smile that trembled on the edge of laughter. "Exploded away might be more apt, she is a passionate creature, my Uiaras, I never knew where she got it. When I… left, I took that name myself as a matter of pride, you understand."