There was her name-day gold. Wenyarum made sure that custom was kept up. Each name-day, one broad millefur for every year of her life. Three months ago Famtoche had presented her with fifty-two millefurs. She had no illusions about Wenyarum Taleza. Most of the hoard had probably gone on habatrizes and uniforms-and on the jewelry he pressed on her (conscience money, no doubt, and bragging rights), but there should be something left. The private passage between their bedrooms must be thick with dust and spiders by now; he was the only one to use it, she’d never had the least desire to go to him, but he’d showed her the trick of the panels and she remembered. She wouldn’t have to go into the outer halls and face that sneering guard. Wonder if Famtoche set a guard on Wenyarum’s suite? Hmm. I can send Desantro there tomorrow to fetch… what? Considering the condition of my library, a scroll… what does he have… never mind, I’ll think of something later… if there’s no guard, then that’s how I get out.
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Penhari held the lamp close to the panels on the right side of her bed. “Shoulder… diyo, shoulder high, him not me.” The panels were carved with fertility signs, embarrassing even now when she was looking closely at them for the first time in years. She snorted as she remembered the disgust she felt when he showed her what to move. “One half turn so what was hanging is now standing high. Abey’s Sting. The minds of these men.”
Something clunked. The panel opened a crack, groaning as it moved. She pushed at it and with diffi-
culty got it wide enough to let her move the lamp into the stifling darkness beyond. “Spiders, tchah!”
She set the lamp on the bedtable and went for the broom Desantro had taken to leaving in the water room so she wouldn’t have to haul it back and forth each day.
›-›
The panel in Wenyanim’s bedroom cracked open.
Penhan froze as she heard voices and other sounds.
She placed the broom carefully in the corner between wall and paneling, blew the lamp out, set it down and leaned against the crack. Listening.
The voices were muffled. A man and a woman, not in the bedroom but in one of the rooms beyond. She couldn’t make out the words, but she didn’t really need to.
She caught hold of the panel, tried to ease it farther open, winced as it groaned.
“Wha’s zat?” A woman speaking.
The man’s voice rumbled, impatience sharpening a few of the syllables so she could hear them, but she still couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Come from in here.” The woman sounded closer. Penhari held her breath and waited,
“Rats, that’s all. Come on, you can’t go in there. That jegger’s nose could sniff a leaky keups like you five days gone and fifty miles off.”
Chambermassal. Hunh. Talking about rats. Nay, mice. Overrunning the place the minute the cat’s away. How he dares… Wenyarum would skin him screaming if he knew…
“I swear I heard somethi g.”
“Can’t have. No one comes here but that yatz.”
“Don’t… I don’t like inhere. If he found us…”
“K’lann, Hlakki, he’s down in Pili groveling around in dung and ashes with his ass in the air, tonguing ol’
Prophet’s filthy feet.”
– You don’t knooow.”
“Sure I do. Comma hee-er, bebesha. Ahhh, soft, soft…”
“Don’t! I don’t like it here, I wanna go.”
Penhari grimace at the sound of scuffling, glass breaking then a slap and the patter of feet, the slam of a door.
The Chambermassal cursed, stomped out, was back before Penhari could get to her feet. She heard the clinic and clatter of the glass; then the brisk rasp of a scrub brush. A moment later the door slammed again.
She waited a long dreary time before she shoved at the panel again.
After lighting the lamp at the nightglow, she went cautiously into the next room, wrinkled her nose at the stink of brandy. Fool. When the General got back… She frowned. If he came back…
She set the lamp on the desk, went round it to inspect the elaborate carvings of the paneled wall. This is harder… not so many cues… “Where was it? Where… was…” He always brought her in here and had her take the gold from Famtoche’s Mizam, made her stow it in the cavity.
“Diyo, got it.” She pressed the bosses, smiled as a small square of iron-faced wood sprang at her. The opening was a foot square and an arm’s length deep.
She began taking the canvas bags from the stash, setting them on the desk, not altogether surprised to find some of them much lighter than they should have been.
She emptied the stash, began going through the bags. At least half of them were plumped out with crumpled paper, there to make a show. She tossed these back inside the hole, put the others in the shoulderbag she’d cobbled together from a pillow sham and some strapping.
Penhari looked at the piles of coin scattered about the bed. Not much gold left in the mix, mostly silver and copper. Abey be blessed, the last sack still had its fifty-two gold pieces intact; the General hadn’t had time to raid that one. “How am I going to work this? I’m going to have to trust her, that’s all.” She counted out the fifty silver cems for the boatman and his boat, set that aside, counted a hundred more of the broad silver coins, added two gold millefurs, tied them up in a bag, they were Desantro’s fee. She took the rest back to the sham-sack and closed the panel on it. It was as safe there as in her jewelry box, safer probably.
She dropped on the bed, rubbed her hand across her face, then grimaced at the streaks of black dust and sweat. Bath. Then work on the clothing, get the jewels tucked away. I can sleep in the daytime. Five days. It sounded like forever when Desantro said it. Abey’s Sting, I’m going to have to work my fingers off
› › ‹ ‹
About an hour after sundown on the Vungian festa on the night of the Moondark, a tall, bent old woman dressed in coarse gray trudged out of the Fahnatarr behind another, younger slave.
“Hsst.” Desantro tugged at Penhari’s sleeve. “Slow down,” she whispered, “‘tisn’t a race. Keep y’ head down. You forgetting everything.”
Penhari nodded, her enveloping cloak shifting against her shoulders as her head bobbed. She pulled the edges together again over the worn blouse and skirt Desantro had found for her. She was stifling in these layers of clothing, weighed down by everything she had„ stowed about her body, and she was sweating from excitement and an unfocused terror, her stomach knotting and burning.
The streets they hurried along were canyons between straight black walls of the Fundarim and Naostam tow-
ers, warrens that housed the Corasso poor, packed together in uneasy masses. The noise from the towers was partially muffled by the stone, but it fell on them like clubs as they went past.
“Is the city always this noisy?” Penhari murmured.
“Folk been moving off land, can’t crop it without water. We turn here.” Desantro tugged Penhari down a smaller side street. “Don’t want to get mixed with crowd at Sok Circle. Only place they c’n go is with their kin, so there’s two three times as many bodies shoved in there. That’s a rowdy crowd. At the Circle, I mean. During festal.’”
Penhari tugged the frayed veil so she could see through the uneven eyeholes. Desantro sounded wistful, as if she’d like to be there, plunged into the middle of that noise and motion.