"You are too sensitive, Master Limner," Zan-derei said softly. "You must learn to accept what each day brings. In these times, ideals are an expensive luxury."
"Do you want a portrait too?" Lalo asked bitterly.
"Oh, I would not be worth the trouble-" Zan-derei smiled. "Besides, I know how I appear to the world."
Cymbals crashed, and as Lalo's startled pulse began to slow he realized that the other end of the room was flaring with the colored silks of the dancing girls. He should have expected it, having watched them rehearse almost every afternoon while he worked on the paintings here.
Such a commotion, he thought, for a few strangers who will make notes on Sanctuary as most artists make portraits-recording only the surface of reality and then will be gone.
Happily abandoning their conversations, the Commissioners let the purple-clad pages usher them to couches below the dais on which the Prince was already enthroned. The dancers, chosen from among the more talented of Kadakithis' lesser concubines, moved sinuously through the ornate topography of their dance, pausing only from time to time to detach a veil.
Trembling with reaction, Lalo drifted towards the row of pillars that supported the vaulted and domed ceiling. Someone had left a goblet on the marble bench, nearly full. Lalo took a long swallow, then made himself put it down again. His heart was pounding as loudly as the drums.
Why am I so afraid? he wondered, and then wondered how he could be anything else, in a town where footpads dogged your steps by day, and if you heard a scream after dark you ran not to help but to bar your door. It must be better in the Capital... there must be somewhere Gilla and I could live in safety.
He lifted the goblet once more, but the wine tasted sour and he set it back half-full. Coricidius would not care if he left the celebration now that he had exhibited both the pictures and their creator. Lalo wanted to go home.
He got to his feet and stepped around the pillar, then halted, startled as something in front of him seemed to move. After a moment he laughed, realizing that it was only his reflection in the polished marble that faced the wall. Dimly he could see the glitter of embroidery on his festival jerkin, and the sheen on his full breeches, but they could not disguise the stoop of his narrow shoulders or the way his belly had begun to round. Even the thinning of his ginger hair was somehow mirrored there. But through some quality of the dark marble or some trick of the light, Lalo's face was as shadowed as that of the Ilsig King.
Lalo worked his way around the outside of the Presence Hall to the side door. The corridor seemed quiet after the clamor of music and the wine-fueled babble of conversation, and the government offices that occupied the spaces between the Hall and the outside of the Palace were empty and dark. As he had expected, the side-door leading to the courtyard was bolted tight. With a sigh he went the other way, passed through the Hall of Justice that fronted the Palace as quickly as he could, and out through one of the great double doors that led onto the porch and broad stair.
Torches had been fixed in the pillars at the top and bottom of the stair, and their fitful light gleamed on the armour of the guards who stood at attention on each of the four wide steps, and glowed on the purple pennon tied to each spear, then rayed out across the inner courtyard in uneven ribbons of brightness and shadow, as if the soldiers had become part of the Palace architecture.
Lalo paused for a moment, noting the effect. Then he saw that the first guard was Quag, nodded, and received in answer the flicker of an eyelid in the wooden patience of the Hell-Hound's face.
Lalo's sandals crunched on grit as he crossed the flagstones of the inner courtyard, punctuating the patter of applause that drifted from the Palace, at this distance as faint as the sound of wavelets on a shore. He supposed that the concubines had stripped off their final veils. He must remember not to show Gilla the sketches he had made of them practicing.
One of Honald's many nephews was on duty in the guardbox set into the massive archway of the Palace Gate. Tonight the double doors were opened wide, and Lalo passed through unquestioned, though he remembered a time when all he owned would not have been enough to bribe the Gatekeeper to let him enter here. He felt dizzy, although he had hardly had any wine.
Why can't I be satisfied with what I have? he wondered. What is wrong with me?
He crossed the expanse of Vashanka's Square more quickly, heading diagonally towards the West Gate and the Governor's Walk. For a moment the east wind brought him the rank, fuggy smell of the Zoo Gardens, then it shifted and he felt on his face the cool breath of the sea.
He halted just outside the Gate and with a sigh reversed his cloak so that its dull inner lining concealed his festival clothes. It was well known in the appropriate places that Lalo never carried money-in the old days he had never had any, and now Gilla controlled the family treasury- but he would not want anyone to make a mistake in the dark.
A waxing moon was already brightening the heavens, and the rooftops of the city made a jagged silhouette against the stars. Not since he was a boy, slipping from his pallet behind his father's workbench to join his friends' adventur-ing, had Lalo seen Sanctuary at this hour with sober eyes. Just now, with all its sordidness obscured by shadow, it seemed to him to be possessed of a kind of haphazard but enduring integrity.
His feet had carried him almost to Shadow Lane without his attention when they encountered something soft. He leaped awkwardly aside to avoid stepping into the contents of a honeypot which someone had emptied into the street to stink and steam, until the rain washed it into the city's underground maze of sewers and it was carried off by the tide. He had been into those tunnels once, on a dare, through an entry shaft near the Vulgar Unicorn. He wondered if it were still there....
What am I doing, getting sentimental about Sanctuary/ thought Lalo as he inspected the sole of his sandal to see if any ordure remained. I must have had more wine than I thought! He had heard that in Ranke, armies of street cleaners scoured the streets every night to rid the city of the refuse of the day. ...
He remembered the flatteries of Lord Raxi-mander and that strange man, Zanderei, and he remembered the days when his one desire had been to get out of Sanctuary. It seemed to him that his life had consisted of cycles in which he dreamed of escape, found new hope for life in Sanctuary, discovered that his hope was unjustified, and began to plan flight once more.
This last time, when he had found that if he stuck to mythological subjects and chose his models carefully he could turn Enas Yorl's gift to a blessing, he had been sure that his troubles were over. But now here he was, bewailing his fate again.
I should have learned better by now ... he thought morosely, but what is there to Jearn? Wii] anything but death stop this wheel or make it take a different path?
Houses leaned close together above him now, cutting off the sky. In some of the windows lamplight glowed, though most of them were tightly shuttered, edged and chinked with light that dappled the worn cobbles below. Lalo winced as a murmur of voices exploded into abuse. A mangy dog that had been nosing at something in the gutters looked up at the noise, then went back to its meal.
Lalo shuddered, visualizing death as a starving jackal-hound waiting to spring. There must be some other way-he told himself, for however much he hated his life, he feared death more.
Human shadows slid from the shadows behind him, and he forced himself to walk steadily, knowing that at this hour, in this part of Sanctuary, it was indeed death to be visibly afraid. By daylight the area shared in the quasi respectability of the Bazaar, but by night it belonged to the Maze.