Chapter 1 - The Slaying
Along the drift of the white Mantes Mountains, southward-flying, its shadow rippling in small reflection across the broken stones and pinched, illiberal soil, comes a bird of ill omen. A bristling starling under the bloody light of a near-noon sun, it passes over shrub and stream, past the razor crest of Mount Galya and through the darkened Lame Man’s Gorge, floating down beneath the clouds. Faster it comes, plunging, feathers stuttering, then spreading the canvas of its wings wide to catch an updraft. It rises with the swell of a hill, then a ledge, then comes against a tall wall of stacked stones. Rising faster, the starling surges like a wave over the top of a crenelated wall, and beholds a mountain town.
Aster-Szem. The black bird throws its black wings wide, as if to embrace the prospect. Each wing stretches out to one half of the town, left hugging Aster, right enveloping Szem. It is only a little bird. But as the broad red sun shines down through the glass covering the sky, upon the black bird’s back, each of the avian limbs casts a wide and diluted shadow. The starling levels and rides the wind. Straight down the middle of Aster-Szem, the shadow seems to drag through the streets and the alleys, and the tiled roofs, and roofs of thatch, and the varicolored hair of each pedestrian, like dragging fingers through water in a drifting boat.
The starling drifts lower, and a splinter eastward. Aster slides close below its tucked talons. The waving columns of mottled marble, the pediments carved with livestock and great cats and men, the layers of ceramic shingle, the long flat roads of smoothly cobbles black and purple stones, the hollow of a well, the yellowed glass surfaces of the town’s siltstack, the mini-town-walls of hibiscus hedge with huge crimson flowers - each briefly blackens under the bird’s shadow.
Dropping, the starling flies through a wide street. The painted blue lattice of Kyga’s Arts flits past. From the parted curtain of a row home, a quarter-full cup of ruddy wine echoes the squealing laugh of the merry gentleman holding it; heard for a flash as the bird flits by. Pedestrians in summer coats of fleecy texel wool stream underneath in twos and threes, heedless of the passing silhouette. The bird hovers mere meters overhead. It careens straight toward a covered stretch of road, a columned arcade, brimming with street goers and trade stalls.
The starling flits through the wide mouth of the arcade, its ominous shadow merging unheeded with the shadows of the rafters and the eaves. Its passage shakes the flames in one multicandle tube propped on the shelf of a pillar. Its orange light, only a small portion of the vast light of the many multicandles illuminating the arcade, flickers on the biscuit-colored shirtsleeves of one human man. The starling’s yellow eye catches the flicker. The starling’s black wings twist. The starling’s yellow beak reels back, and the starling’s hooked feet stretch out, and the small shadow of the starling affixes itself to the back of the man’s neck.
“Grave glory,” the man in the biscuit-colored wool shirt exclaimed. He ducked sideways. Swiping an arm around the back of his short cropped hair, he flicked a quick glance among the passing traffic.
A taller man glanced away from the market stall he had been bent over. “What’s that you say, Setter Hearn?” The tall man had a wilder mange of brown beard across his cheeks and a much finer summer coat of navy colored cloth.
“Nothing, Setter Kemmon.” The man in the tan shirt resumed an upright, modest height, and straightened out the short sleeves of his shirt. Casting one more look at the crowd in the boulevard, he added, “It felt as though an arbalest bolt buzzed past my head.”
The bearded man had his eyes and ears turned entirely away by that point. From the counter before him he raised a long cylindrical tube with a leaver and a strap, one of several on the table. “Do you know what this is?” he asked in an excited sideways whisper.
“No, setter.”
“An agastropos.”
“It’s a fine looking coilspear.”
“They only issue this model to the army. Unless you Teironians have a more liberal policy on civilian-owned weaponry?”
I can speak little of coilspears,” answered Hearn of Teiron, foreign guide with the Aster-Szem Border Agency. “But Lystor, here, sources his equipment direct from a blacksmith on the Aster side of town, who in turn sources his steel from-”
Kemmon interrupted with a laugh and a rub of his beard. “No need to read the seller’s script.”
Hearn shrugged at Lystor, the balding merchant behind the stall. He pushed a tan hand into the open neck of his shirt, drawing a pocket clock hanging from his neck by a chain. “Your auction starts at noon, setter,” said Hearn.
“Just a moment more,” Kemmon replied. “By-the-by, who else here on the promenade would have blank books?”
“Blank books?”
“Leatherbound, nothing on the paper.”
“Like a journal, setter?”
Kemmon had turned away from the stall. From the heavy sack at his hip he took a spotted leather fan. He waved it vaguely. “Thicker. The scientists fill a lot of paper on expeditions like mine, you know.”
“I understand.”
“It’s inconvenient’s the thing. Weight’s an enormous factor when you’re pulling all your gear by sled.”
“There’s one vendor you might try,” said Hearn, thinking. “He doesn’t put up his stall under the arcade. He sets up on the Szem side of town.”
“A muira?” asked Kemmon.
Hearn nodded once. “In a market at the edge of their city pasture.”
“Nevermind. Are those pickled seabulbs across the way? Good thing to have on an expedition.”
Hearn spun toward the opposite way the explorer had pointed. He had heard a shout. But, he saw no face he recognized in the stream of humans and muira passing between the hedged pillars of the arcade. He noticed Kemmon stepping out into the thoroughfare. He stopped him with a touch on the shoulder, and subtly turned him toward the north exit. “Setter Kemmon,” he said, “as your guide, I advise that we should start toward the auction-yard.”
“No,” The explorer replied, accompanying the syllable with a smirk.
“Setter, I-”
“Oh enough with the setters, Hearn,” said Kemmon. He waved the spotted fan again. “We have time. I want to see what your - what’s it called again?”
“The Arcade.”
“I’m looking for a good deal on provisions. If I can make a contact before the auction, so much the better.”
“It’s only my recommendation,” said Hearn. He tapped his pocket clock with an index before stuffing it back inside his open collar.
“You were so mellow on both sides of town yesterday. When we went about the streets. What’s your local nose smelling now that makes you anxious?”
The Border Agent was about to reply, when the voice he thought he had recognized earlier called out to him, closer, more directly, less mistakeable.
“It was a starling!”
A middle-aged, muscular man stepped diagonally across the covered boulevard to meet the pair where they stood. The crowd slid wide around the man, for he wore no shirt, and puffed smoke from the stub of a cigar at every other step.
“Who’s this man?” Kemmon asked as he fanned himself.
The muscled shirtless man ignored the question. He spoke around the cigar, which he held in his teeth with a grin. “It was a starling. That is what bloodied your delicate cheek, Hearn of Teiron.”
“Fine day, Theogenes,” said Hearn flatly. He daubed a plain rag against the side of his mouth where the bird had clawed him. To Kemmon he added, “This is Theogenes of Barthos. He is a beggar.”
“Theogenes of Leeges,” the man corrected with a puff of his cigar. “I am a man of the whole cylinder. No nation has a claim on me.”
“Interesting,” said Kemmon.
“He wants to make himself look like a steady, prestigious man,” Theogenes went on. He jabbed his thumb at Hearn. “He has his head trimmed nice and short, has his skin tanned and the hairs on his chest black and on display, and his shape lean - like he’s some soldier.”
“I can spare a few copper rings,” said Hearn politely, digging into the ring sack on his hip.
“Want some bread?” Theogenes held out a fistful of silt bread.
“No.”
“Maybe he was a soldier.” Theogenes went on unperturbed. “But a real man wouldn’t lose his nerve every time a little sparrow swooped.”
“A soldier, eh?” said Kemmon.
“I was,” said Hearn.
“In the Teironian army?”
“Their last territory war. With Thiges.”
“Mountainous country, Thiges.”
“Rather.”
“Tell me,” Kemmon splayed his spotted leather fan wide, “do you know this animal?”
“I do,” said Hearn. He placed a few copper rings in the open palm of Theogenes.
“A mankiller cat. Hard beast to hunt. Know anyone in this town who might sell their pelts? They’re proof against poisonous wind, I’m told.”
“On the Aster side-”
Hearn was cut off by Theogenes. “Why go seeking after a pelt pre-stripped and dipped in urine for your pleasure? Hunt it yourself. Or better, pick some petals of the melyna flower; melyna, that the Wind spreads across our cylinder for the very purpose. Why is it that you tourists find pleasure in needlessly complicated living?”
“Hearn,” said Kemmon, who had not listened, and was staring upward, “why is the ceiling painted with overcast sky? Why no stars, or Theman’s Wounded Sun?”
Hearn said, “It’s not painted to be overcast. The paint has mottled to grey.”
“Pity,” said Kemmon, though it sounded like “Pliny.”
“Kemmon-” Hearn again pulled Kemmon back from the mix of pale skinned muira and tan-skinned men moving in the boulevard.
Kemmon looked back at Theogenes. “What are you doing in the market today, setter Theogenes?”
“Watching animals,” replied the beggar.
Kemmon did not hear the reply, for at that moment another shirtless man strode right past, strumming the metal strings of a moon harp. “What is all the rush for today?” he asked.
“A noble muira passes through town,” answered Theogenes.
“An emissary,” added Hearn. He set the rag back in his pocket, the bird cut seemed to have stopped bleeding. “Representative for Her Majesty Queen Anastasia Balgah of Ahn.”
“I heard there was something. Revenue on new silt land? South of your Teironian border.”
“Some territory deal,” Hearn agreed.
“Some silly artificial division of the Universal Land,” said Theogenes. He shook his head, then waved at the pair as he stepped in with the stream. “I’m going to see the circus. Farewell.”
As Theogenes walked away Kemmon said, “Strange fellow.”
“He’s a local curiosity,” said Hearn.
“This parade business; are you worried about your town?”
“A bit.”
“Afraid we’ll be trampled by the crowd?”
Hearn clasped a fist over his lips as he spoke, with the knuckle of his index touching the columella of his nose. “There’s rowdiness whenever a muira envoy comes to Teiron.”
“Hearn,” Kemmon scolded. “Dear me, I thought you were even-minded. Muira are little different from us men. I’ve stepped onto the swaying deck of a multiship, uncertain of my future, beside many fine members of the race.”
“I keep varied company across all of Aster-Szem,” Hearn replied.
“Good. Sorry.”
“Tension brings out the crazies from both sides.”
“So who’s the diplomatic lamb?”
Srik Tillich, Elder of hearth Tillich, Elder Migrant for The Kingdom of Ahn, royal councilor for Her Majesty Queen Anastasia Balgah, marched through a seething tumble of bronze and ivory people with a mastered smile of cordiality screwed upon his cheeks. He kept pace with the warping square of royal army muira standing guard around him; their hewers sheathed at their hips, but with a finger of each blade shining, poised for use; their faces sweating under heavy fibercaulk breastplates and helms, and the heavy crimson heat of the sun, and the heavy press of the excited mob; their even square bowing and buckling. And as they buckled, and one of his youngest knights fell into wrestling with a muira man carrying a truncheon, Srik thought to himself, ‘How much more?’
At the same moment, at a different angle, among the sweating mass of excited faces, one face watched the line of knights surrounding the visiting councilor with keen, hard, pale-green eyes. The eyes watched from beneath the hood of a black-green summer cloak. The cloak hid the face of the individual so that - while those same eyes could plainly discern the movement of every one of Srik Tillich’s twelve knights - no other eyes in the crowd held such an angle as to see the features of the watcher’s face. Not that any muira or human would have marked the face, even had it been limned in the beam-lanterns of the theater. The watcher adopted as closely as possible the attitude of the crowd around it, swaying when the person beside it swayed, letting the arms behind it shove it a step here or there. A pedestrian perfectly unremarkable. A body of no consequence. A person who, though they seemed at one with the crowd, nevertheless must have had something to say about Srik Tillich and his knights. For, as the face watched, concealed, under the shadow of its black-green hood, the lips of the watcher began to move.
At that precise moment still, as Srik Tillich’s guard pressed their way through the throng, and as the watcher stood at some small distance in the direction of the councilor’s progress, another figure struggled with the bodies before and around him. Zalan Sipeth was a true muira man of no consequence. He wore a plain wool summer tunic, more green than white from stains, and plain working sandals. He calloused his fingers by pulling weeds from the soil beds in the siltstack on the Aster side of town. He considered himself fortunate for having so easily found new employment when Szem’s siltstack closed. He was the elder of his hearth, which occupied a rowhome of hundred-year-old stones on the Szem side of town - but which Zalan, and his mother, and his wife, kept perfectly clean. He raised his older son and two younger daughters to be disciplined and respectful to their hearth and their elder, but never to lose touch with their neighbors of Aster. He ate perhaps overmuch bread. He drank one cup of wine more than was strictly necessary at suppertimes. His temper could go flying if he did not catch hold of it early. He was, however, on-the-whole, an amiable muira. He revered the smallbones of his household gods. Moving forward through the throng, as the procession moved toward him, Zalan tried to tell himself that Srik and his Royal Knights revered their own gods’ smallbones. But Srik Tillich kept a larger hearth than Zalan Sipeth. For Zalan to control his own temper was a trial.
Srik Tillich, Elder Migrant, could hardly tell the prevailing temper. The bronze and ivory faces were such a mixed bag of resentment, glee, and sorrow, and they moved so constantly as his guard pressed down the road, that he could not tell what would happen if his knights broke rank. Srik saw one of his knights point to a heavy-shouldered man. The man stood in the crowd through which they had already passed. The man had raised a bottle, corked and half full of wine. Srik’s knight did the exact thing he had feared - broke rank to shove his way toward that individual. No member of the shouting throng rushed into the gap, but any one of them might. Would the crowd grab the royal-silver buttons on his royal-silver robe, and tear them away, and then tear the robe away, and then tear at his own ivory skin and golden muira veins too? Would they raise him on their shoulders and carry him off to some working class haunt, a diner where muira made their cheeks ruddy with cheap wine after a day in the fields left them pink, and toast his good foreign policy? Or would one sad mother among the crowd - young and pretty - come forth with the bundle of a small dead thing in her arms. Would she sink to her knees before him? Would she raise the bundle in accusation, and beg to know how he justified himself to gods and hearth and monarch? How he could allow barbarians to enter their homeland of Ahn and kill off the native muira? All this had happened, or very-nearly happened, to Srik Tillich, Elder Migrant, in parades of other days.
And yet the watcher in the black-green cloak, waiting patiently and murmuring at a dwindling distance, had not one of Srik’s anticipations in mind. The watcher’s hidden eyes saw nothing frightful in the packed bodies. The watcher’s ears heard no terror in the universal din of voices from humans and muira alike. Beneath the hood, hidden from view, two cold wads of tarcloth filled the watcher’s small ears. While all the populace of Aster-Szem seemed gathered in this one place for the express purpose of producing disruptive sound, the watcher heard nothing, and suffered no disruption. Not the wail of a crow as it rose from its perch under the projectile barrage of a grinning human boy; not the gradual shift among Srik’s guard from the uniform tread of marching boots to scattered thumps; not the crash of steel on steel as another knight drew away from the square to clash bracers with a veteran human soldier; not one of these phenomenon broke the watcher’s concentration. The watcher’s eyes sunk deep in Srik Tillich. Like a hook in the mouth of a fish. The watcher’s fingers reached into a fold of the black-green robe, into a small sack, and clutched at sharp chunks of ceramic therein. The watcher’s lips continued in the quiet, regular cadence of a Chant.
Now, as Zalan Sipeth stood in the crowd, taking elbows to the ribs (and giving elbows back where it was deserved) he carried one of the sackcloth dolls of his ancestors in both hands. He wrapped his fingers firmly around his uncle’s tiny bones inside the doll, so that they did not cluck. He looked down at his uncle’s sack (with his uncle’s smallbones inside) and back at Srik Tillich and his knights, and argued in his own mind, in stern tones. “Now Zalan, old man, you told yourself to come out today. You swore to demand an answer from the Elder Migrant. Why does he wish to push you and yours out of your hearth? Why would he replace them with Higans and other foreigners from the southern continents? Why do Srik Tillich and his migrant council want to toss aside your gods, and bring sun-worshiping loons into Ahn to take their place? Or is that the right way to say it… No time to think now, old man. Srik’s coming right toward you. Now comes the test; will you ask him your question, or will you let those strong-arms shove you away? Seems as if the guards are harassed. Here’s your chance, old man. Will you take it?”
Srik raised a hand and waved at the mass. The silver buttons of his cuff glinted. One man shoved a hand between two of Srik’s knights. Before the guards could shove the man away, Srik took the hand in both of his own and imparted a tight squeeze. A warm squeeze, though a little damp. The day was hot, and filled with an anxious energy which even a seasoned campaigner like Srik Tillich, Elder Migrant, felt.
Srik leaned back as the man’s hand was lost. He kept his boots moving. He leaned to his right - Srik was a tall man, and his lean body cast a long shadow on the rough stones of Szem - and whispered in the ear of his first knight, Benji Faraga, cupping a hand around his mouth and dropping the kind smile. “Is it much farther, Ben?”
Benji Faraga pushed away a young man who had tried to duck beneath his arm. He had not meant it maliciously, but his military arm sent the youth sprawling on the pavement. A human woman - the man’s mother, doubtless - raised a howl like the knight had dealt her son his deathblow. Benji Faraga, ignoring this, leaned to his elder and said, “Pardon, setter?”
“The embassy,” Srik said a little louder. “Are we close?”
“Keep form,” Benji Faraga grunted to his knights as a stone struck his helmet. In a quieter voice he said, “Not two blocks, setter Tillich.”
Srik pulled back his black felt cap, and wiped a bead of sweat from his eyebrows.
The watcher under the hood saw Srik pause to clasp the hand. The watcher stepped forward a pace. The timing was all wrong. The square formation of the knights had broken, some drawn off by expected threats within the crowd, some by unexpected fortune. But that same crowd had slowed the councilor’s progress. Now, as the Chant from the watcher’s lips rang out a little louder at its steady cadence, and as the tiny chunks of pottery in the watcher’s hand began to shiver, the watcher saw that it was too soon. A cluster of rustic ivory-skinned muira stood between the watcher and Srik. The watcher tried to force through.
Zalan, however, had already managed to press his way to the front. He found to his surprise that no line of royal army warriors stood to beat him aside. Two were locked up on Srik’s left side with three drunken men singing a battle-march in their faces and trying to push past. The last, a muira man in the tasseled epaulets of a First Knight, held Srik by the elbow and tried to press through the street. But at that same moment Zalan saw a beggarly-looking human grab the knight’s helmet and rip it away. When the knight spun to look, two other beggars swarmed him. They pulled him off of the councilor, trying to steal his sheathed hewer and tasseled epaulets. Between Zalan, clutching his uncle’s bones, and Srik Tillich, none stood.
The watcher’s Chant had risen to a clear, spoken voice. The watcher shoved two muira pedestrians in the cluster aside. One was a woman with a wrinkled face and grey hair. She fell to the street on her wrist. The watcher did not hear the old woman shriek of pain, though the twisting of the wrinkled face gave evidence. Nor did the watcher catch the angry bark of a balding muira man. The watcher’s ears were muffled. The watcher’s eyes were fixed on Srik Tillich. The crowd of muira around the small cloaked figure laid arms and hands toward it. But only for a moment. Then they fell back with sudden faces of fear. The watcher’s speaking voice rose higher, and the broken shards of vibrating pottery began to slip piece by piece from the folds of the black-green cloak. The way to Srik lay open.
Srik felt a sharp tug on his elbow that nearly knocked him off his feet. He turned to find his faithful Ben swallowed by human men trying to steal his equipment. Srik Tillich’s practiced smile flagged. He took a step toward his First Knight. Before he could take a second, a different hand tugged at Srik’s other sleeve. He spun. He found himself shaking the wet hand of a babbling, starstruck girl with dinner plate eyes. Srik smiled, but looked past her. He saw The Villgoranian embassy now, but it was yet many houses down the street. A sea of strange, mixed faces stared at him, and nothing stood between them. Srik Tillich, elder migrant, felt his heart wince with sudden apprehension.
All at once Zalan Sipeth found himself standing before the councilor. The first thing he did was to pause and think to himself: ‘My own shirt’s a shabby piece of cloth next to his.’ When he realized the councilor was surrounded, though, and being grabbed on all sides, the second thing that Zalan did was set his uncle’s smallbones in a loop on his belt. He barked out in a loud voice, “Keep off him now!”
Srik Tillich looked at the stocky muira man suddenly standing before him. “What?” he asked, eyes wide and frightened.
“Never mind, setter Tillich,” said Zalan. “Just follow me, elder. Don’t look afraid. I’ll see you to the embassy. Clear off all of you!”
“Thank you-” Srik began.
Buzzing.
Srik looked about and started to say, “-what-”
Shades of carved pottery whistled through the air. Srik felt a sudden flash of pain in his stomach. He winced. Gasped. He looked down. His bright green robe, strangely, seemed suddenly turning to bright crimson. Srik felt another sting, and another, on his neck and shoulder. He looked up. He thought he saw something whip past his eye. Then he felt pain on his temple, and half his sight was washed in the same crimson color. He looked to his left. The stocky man was no longer trying to pull him along, but falling away, with little red flowers blooming across his own chest, and eyes stretching on his pale face. Somewhere someone screamed. Then another voice. All at once the air seemed full of screaming. Srik felt a knee buckle, and his breath catch. He sank. “I’m dying,” he thought, strangely calm.
Zalan hit the ground on his back. He groaned. He rolled his eyes; though they were wide enough now to take in much, his vision through them seemed somehow narrow. He thought he saw a hooded face dancing, and a mouth speaking in a clear voice, in the midst of a whirling storm of broken pieces of brown ceramic. Only for a moment. Then the figure suddenly turned and ran. Everyone was running. Zalan felt their boots, faintly vibrating through the stone. Someone kicked his leg, but he hardly felt that. His chest was on fire. He glanced down. The front of his shirt was drenched in blood. He groaned again. He rolled to his side. His eyes met the wide, white, staring eyes of Srik, lying beside him.
“Well… old man,” thought Zalan vaguely.
He thought no more.
“What’s happened?” said Kemmon the explorer. He reached for the arm of a man he saw running into the shade of the arcade. But the man only glanced at Kemmon, spluttered, and ran on. Kemmon turned to Hearn. “Is there another spectacle in town today?”
“Not scheduled,” said Hearn, frowning. He stepped away from the wineseller’s table and raised a palm over his eyes. Beyond the arcade the sun shone bright and red. Hearn could see that the excited gentleman who had stumbled by only came as the fastest of a throng, the leading trickle of a flash flood. More were coming. Hearn pressed a palm against Kemmon’s chest and pushed him back into the shelter of a grooved support column. “Step back. Something’s wrong.”
“My friend-” Kemmon thought of the fellow explorer he had intended to meet in town. The few other merchants and pedestrians scattered throughout the covered boulevard had noticed the oncoming press. They leaned out on either side of the trading street to look. “You, mell in the blue-” Kemmon began to say. This woman ignored him too. The explorer tried again with another muira man, but achieved no better result.
The ranks passing into the dimmer yellow light of the multicandles under the arcade had swelled. A babel of speech - common Leegesspeech, but also Teironian, Muiric, and other native tongues - merged into a mix of half-heard, insensible words.
“-one of the knights had his hewer. Slashing-”
“-Blood. All over-”
“-chasing like lizards after a snake on-”
“-Chanting!”
The last was the shrill scream of a little muira girl carried in her father’s arms. The father had his eyes turned and looking behind as he rushed by the wineseller’s stall. The girl’s scream produced in the throng a fresh wave of panic. Kemmon and Hearn heard two women shriek. They saw an old man stumble against the stone base of a pillar, and rise again before anyone could stop to help. They watched the whole crowd duck and scatter and rush on.
Kemmon said to Hearn, “Catch someone’s attention, will you?”
Hearn stepped away from the stall and onto the road. He scanned the crowd. A muira woman - middle-aged, probably in her sixties for her species, with a streaming blue shawl - came bustling down the row of lighted pillars. Her hands were full with a painter’s bag, which she was doing her best not to shake or spill as she hurried. Hearn raised an open palm to her. “Excuse me, mell?” he said, addressing her formally as a woman in her native muiric.
The woman jerked her head toward him. The motion upset her shawl, which fell to the paved, smooth stones of the road. She kept her paints from spilling. She moved right past, only watching Hearn with a close eye and skirting away from him, not even stopping for her shawl. Hearn picked it up and waved it in the air as she ran on. “Mell, your headdress,” he said. She ran without looking back.
Another man, a human with thick whiskers and a fat neck wrapped in a silk sweatcloth, came walking down the same track, keeping his head low with eyes furtively glancing at the crowd. Thinking he recognized a local, Hearn said to the man, in Teironian, “Setter, you’re a fellow man of Aster?”
The man did not stop at once, but he did slow to a heavy trot. He glanced Hearn’s way. Suspicion furrowed his thick eyebrows; he nodded.
“Ask him if he comes from the auction,” said Kemmon in his native Barthan tongue.
“Has something happened?” asked Hearn to the man.
“Murder,” the man replied. He shook his head. He again started walking quickly past with the rest of the crowd.
“Wait,” said Hearn. The man looked at him mistrustfully. Hearn swung an arm at the merchant and the racks behind the stall. “Speak what your eyes have seen. I’ll buy you a skin.”
The man stopped.
Kemmon said, “Ask about my friend too. Offer some rings.”
Behind the man there was a wet, meaty crash. One of the crowd had knocked over a rack of elk veal at another stall. The meat lay on the ground, flesh of animals never given the chance to grow old, lying among the dust of foot traffic. The butcher cursed the one who had knocked it over, but the traffic surged around the mess in the general effort to get away from the western (Szem) entrance to The Arcade.
Finally the man with the silk scarf shrugged. He mounted the stoop and walked up to the wineseller’s counter. The merchant, having himself ventured out to steep himself in the sweat and alarm, stepped back around to the jars behind his table. Hearn drew out from his purse eight copper rings and laid them on the felt cloth atop the table. “The Lampra ‘89, Thoko,” said Hearn. “Two cups.”
Quick as he could the merchant Thoko took two cups from the shelf under his stall. He pulled back the cloth cover of one of the huge wine jars. He dipped the cups inside. He set his ear and the glance of his eye on the panicked crowd as he set first one cup then the other on the felt-topped counter with two soft thuds.
Hearn slid the first cup to the man from the street. The man took it and swallowed it, as easily as a man taking air. Kemmon tugged the brown curls of his beard. “Well?” he said with a tone of impatience, in Barthan. “What’s everyone excited about?”
“Setter…?” said Hearn to the man.
“Theon,” answered the man. He took the second cup and swallowed that as well. “Of Aster.”
“You come with a large crowd, from Szem, Theon of Aster.”
“Been a murder.”
“Did your eyes see it?”
“Not directly.” Theon daubed his wrinkled forehead with the sweatcloth. “I was stood up on the highwalk that runs along The Southway. Right around the Bela Stonehomes.”
“I know it.” Hearn glanced over the man’s shoulder. An old muira man was being pulled along by his daughter, and shaking a sackcloth bag containing the smallbones of a dead relative over his head.
“Well, that snowskin chieftain came marching down The Southway. All his snowkin troops in a box around him. Except half of Aster and all of Szem had come out to see him, and were blocking up the road. Everyone wanted to get close, trying to touch him. Even some of his own kind were trying to get at him. He wasn’t popular back home, I hear, on account of being in charge of those Migrant Forts they have in Ahn.”
“What is the man saying?” asked Kemmon.
“About the parade,” translated Hearn.
“Ask if he’s seen my muira friend.”
“Go on,” said Hearn to Theon of Aster, as he noticed the man cast an anxious look at Kemmon.
“Those snowskin soldiers started breaking off to deal with the mob.” Theon addressed the wineseller with a nod that made his neck fat wobble, and Hearn obligingly placed another set of rings down on the table. As Thoko the seller took one of the cups, wiped it, and drew another swallow’s-worth from the jar, Theon went on: “The mob didn’t swarm him all at once. But one fella came up and grabbed that fine silver he had on, and another started trying to steal his hat. I thought they were going to tear his clothes off. Then, all of the sudden, I heard a scream. The whole crowd went silent for just a moment. And in the gap… I don’t know. It sounded like strange voices. Like those Chanter monks.”
Theon stopped to drink his third cup. Hearn watched him intently, his hand squeezed into a fist over his mouth. Kemmon switched looks back and forth between the two. The wineseller Thoko was leaning in now too, to hear the man’s comparatively sensible explanation, over the insensible shouting of those rushing past. Hearn said, “Did you see someone killed?”
“It looked like it to me, I don’t know for sure,” Theon said with a gasp and a shrug. “The space around that Srik fellow widened. I saw two people on the ground. Thought I saw blood. I definitely saw another, smaller man running off. It looked to me like - I can’t describe it - like a little tornado of debris in the air. Then it all fell on the ground. That’s all.”
Thoko stopped and shrugged again. Kemmon said, “Did he see my friend?”
Hearn asked, but Thoko shook his head. “No. Sorry. I’m getting myself home now. Best be off the streets I think.” Hearn nodded. The heavy man stepped out onto the boulevard.
The traffic began to taper off.
As Hearn explained the situation to Kemmon, the client who he was meant to guide about the split town of Aster-Szem, he held his shoulders tense, and listened with his ear cocked to the voices of those passing by. He saw and heard one man - somewhere in his forties he looked, with more hair on his chest than his head, and more fat than muscle on his frame - shouting for someone, anyone, to “hand him a hewer” and he’d take care of the muira thug who’d given themselves the Writ to Cut Bodies in Aster-Szem. The man’s wife, or perhaps his sister, dragged him on. He heard another someone weeping among the passers, but so many heads were bent, so many faces averted, that he could not place the voice.
Kemmon lad listened closely to Hearn’s translation, and caught pieces of vague detail from the crowd. He asked, “What about the auction? Was it close? My friend, would he have been nearby?” To the explorer’s worried tug of beard, Hearn could only say that the auction house was some blocks from the supposed scene of the killing. After that, Hearn of Aster sank to the ledge of the stoop. He sat with his fist clasped before his mouth, frowning.
Later, when the crowd had dispersed, and the only sounds were the undisturbed starlings in the eaves of The Arcade, and the greatly disturbed gossip of the merchants beneath it, Kemmon ceased pacing. His friend arrived. He had seen nothing of the event, but was as greatly relieved to find his explorer companion healthy and safe as Kemmon himself.
While the two traded thoughts about the supposed murder of Srik Tillich, Elder Migrant, Hearn continued to stare. He stared fixedly, at some indistinct spot of the paved road. The multicandle light shone hot and orange against the tan skin and plain shirt and short hair of Hearn, Border Agent, with his hand clasped before his mouth, and his mind occupied.