Kalimpura (Green Universe) (32 page)

The crowd danced, trailing beads … no, strings of grain or rice. Many carried flails, which they whirled with abandon to the cost of a number of bloody noses and bruised skulls as best I could tell. I had no great desire to be caught up in this particular variety of self-flagellation.

Mother Argai did not either, it seemed, because she made no objection as we retreated into a stall where dozens of scrolls were for sale. Books, in the Hanchu style, for Kalimpuri books were traditionally folded slats of bamboo or balsa stitched together with cotton thread dyed a color to tell the reader what they might find within. In my experience, the Stone Coast style of book, being flat papers bound between leathern or boarded covers, was far more practical, but scrolls had their uses. Long lists, for one thing.

At another time I would have admired the books, or passed the time in conversation with the old scribe painfully rendering calligraphy at a little table. This afternoon, I turned my back on him and watched the procession snake by.

Banners soon appeared, and in reading them I knew what it was we saw. The Guild of Reapers, Threshers, and Rice Brokers was out to honor their masters past and present. A festival that celebrated both the ghosts and the living.

This I could approve of.

And while rice was not quite the universal staple in Selistan that it was in the Hanchu lands, I did appreciate how much these folk kept my fellow citizens alive and well fed.

Three coal demons rumbled by on carts. Statues, in chains of foil and rope to catch the eye. They were followed by three more who danced and shuffled, raising great, hairy hands to the crowd in an occasional roar.

Well, I realized, two of them danced and shuffled. The third strode long-legged and intent, with a scowl that I might have expected to see on a real demon.

With a chill, I realized I was not looking at a mummer on stilts in a tall mask with oversized gloves and paint across his skin.

This was no capering Guildsman from the Poppet Dancers. This was my Red Man. Or one of his similars. How many could there be in Kalimpura?

I elbowed Mother Argai in the ribs and pointed with my chin. “Him,” I whispered, as if anyone could have heard a word that passed between us above the racketing noise of the crowd.

She followed my gaze. Her lips parted briefly in a small moue of astonishment. Then our eyes met, we nodded at each other, and dived into the festival crowd. For now, following our Red Man would not be difficult.

I was not sure what would come later.

*   *   *

I thought our pursuit would not be hard, but I had not figured on the slow, leaping pace of the festival crowd. The gyrations of the people around us were both contagious and dangerous. Once, I had to subdue a dancer with his own rice flails to keep him from cracking everyone else around him in the head.

And we could not walk scowling as our target did. I’d already slipped out of—and lost—my robe and veil. Even as Blades, Mother Argai and I both needed to blend with the festival crowd or be marked out, especially once we left the Evenfire Gate District and moved around toward the Landward Gate and, among other things, the more usual haunts of the Street Guild.

So we danced our way, and shouted from time to time, and grinned when we were grinned at. It was foolish and delightful at once. Like a parody of a Blade run. And much as with being at the center of the beggars’ riot, I felt safe among the crowd.
Let the Street Guild try to take me here,
I thought.

I grinned for real at that.

It was, however, deeply tiring.

*   *   *

In time the procession circled the city and proceeded along the Street of Ships until they turned up Savvatana Street and ended at the Rice Exchange. Of course that made sense. We were deep in Street Guild territory now, and fairly close to the Blood Fountain and the Temple of the Silver Lily.

Not precisely among friends. I was beginning to regret casting away my veil. Though I’d hated the pretense of being Sindu.

Mother Argai led me aside into a shadow between the pillars of the Rice Exchange’s façade. These were great, squat-bellied things painted green and red as if grasses grew before a bloody pool. I could not say so much for the taste of our accidental hosts, but we were able to lurk quietly and watch as the festival broke up in earnest.

Most people just drifted off, of course. Many of them carried the party to Prince Kittathang Park, I was certain. The banyans there were gentle shelter against the brief, intense rains that often came at evening, and no one would bother to run them out unless these folk began to set fires or otherwise significantly disturb the peace.

Laborers from the Guild of Poppet Dancers came and helped the mummers undo their masks. They loaded the demon statues onto a cart. My Red Man climbed aboard among the statues and sat quietly there until one of the laborers threw a length of sacking across his shoulders as a cloak.

Two score paces across the square, I could hear his rumbled thanks.
His Seliu has a Petraean accent.
Firesetter had come here from the Stone Coast, though I did not imagine for a moment that my quarry originally hailed from Copper Downs, any more than I did.

“Him,” I whispered to Mother Argai, jabbing my finger.

With this confirmation, we were so much closer to finding Corinthia Anastasia and Samma than we had been since arriving in this city. I clasped myself with shivering joy.

I signed to her that I planned to follow the cart. She leaned close, grabbed my wrist, and tapped out the Blade code that meant she would join me.

Home, I responded. Meaning,
Go home and tell them what is afoot.

She shook her head.

Well, I understood the reluctance to let me run around by myself, given recent events. I would have felt much the same had our roles been reversed.

Still, I wanted word to go to Mother Vajpai and the others. More to the point, I did
not
want to let Firesetter out of my sight.

There was small purpose in further argument. We waited until the cart creaked into motion, along with three others belonging to—or hired by—the Poppet Dancers. Then we followed.

If there is one thing Blades have the skill to do, it is pursue our quarry through the streets of Kalimpura, our city.

*   *   *

My breasts ached enough that they began to leak as Mother Argai and I slipped through the dark of the evening. The wagons followed a meandering route that I soon realized was meant to minimize the number of tight turns the drivers and their teams would be forced to make.

We kept up easily. The Poppet Dancers were in no hurry. I saw the spark of flints and the glow of pipes from the buckboards of two of their wagons. These were men drawing near the end of their day. Their heaviest props were probably those statues, and everything the wagons hauled was meant to be carried by people dancing in the streets, so their unloading would not be overtaxing.

The carts passed through several areas of increasingly ramshackle warehouses and businesses. They avoided streets with large houses even when those would have shortened what I guessed was their route to the cheapest districts near the landward gate. The patient oxen seemed to know their way.

We were moving slowly enough for me to claim a pair of skewers with dripping bird thighs upon them from a wraith-thin woman wrapped in ragged gray who tended a little grill beneath a dead banyan tree. I overpaid her from the handful of paisas I’d accumulated living in our safe house—we’d found several small jars of coins tucked here and there, the caches of servants or children.

The meat was hot and almost sweet upon my tongue. She’d marinated it in honey and orange peels, which impressed me. The food was a sufficient distraction from my thoughts of my children. They were safe enough, and so was I. We were not walking into the faces of our enemies here. Whatever Firesetter might be to me, I did not fear him.

Foolish as that possibly was, when he climbed aboard the wagon, I had not seen in those great, dull eyes the kind of anger that would have made me afraid.

Mother Argai slurped at the last of her bird, then cast the wooden skewer in the gutter along with the bones she’d passed over. I dropped my bones, but kept my skewer by the simple expedient of sliding it into my hair and ignoring the grease. At the moment, it was long enough to need coiling up when I was working, and so the skewer did handy duty in place.

After a while, the carts rumbled onto Geelatti Road, which ran roughly parallel to the Bounded Road here along the northern verge of the city. As I’d expected, we were not too far from the Landward Gate. This was an area of large, decaying warehouses, left over from the days when some trade had required high roofs and large courtyards, before moving on to better markets or fancier quarters.

The Poppet Dancer carts passed through an open gate, their wheels echoing on the cobbles. The oxen were obviously eager to be home. I glanced at Mother Argai. Our eyes met, but neither of us seemed to feel too much caution here, so we simply walked in after the last cart.

The courtyard was fairly large, enough for the four wagons to pull into a semicircle. Several more were parked around the margins. A stable was open-walled in the back of the court, the familiar smell of livestock emitting from the shadows there. Otherwise we were surrounded by high wooden walls with enormous doors, one of which had been thrown open. The gate through which we’d passed had been nothing but a passage in the street-facing wall. Torches of twisted straw set into cressets illuminated the scene with dancing shadows edged orange. Everything was in need of paint, of care, of attention, of time and money that no one here had, clearly.

Already they were unloading. The laborers were mostly older men, some of them stooped or lame. I wondered if they had been mummers once, or were cheaper in their hire due to age and infirmity. Several glanced incuriously at me, but no one seemed alarmed.

The Red Man slid off the tailboard of his wagon. All he really needed do was stretch his legs and stand. His eyes met mine, and now his gaze was not nearly so dull. In fact, he almost glowed.

I met his look with a nod. We had acknowledged each other. With a brush to Mother Argai’s wrist, I turned and left the mummers’ men to their work. We passed out into Geelatti Road and rousted a trio of beggars from their shelter within a good-sized crate across the way. There we settled down to watch.

*   *   *

After a while, I was bored. I looked over at Mother Argai. She appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open.

Small harm in trying. “No Blade run is likely to pass us here, I suppose.”

“No,” she said shortly. “But the Street Guild might be by here sooner or later. They patrol warehouses.”

“Whenever they happen to recall that they are supposed to be more than a gang,” I said ungraciously. Not incorrectly, however.

Late-working merchants passed us by with the occasional nervous glance. Most of them had a stout lad or two walking alongside, many carrying a good-sized staff. Because of the Death Right, people in Kalimpura generally didn’t bother with edged weapons unless they had the means to back themselves up. For the most part, that meant criminals, the larger groups of private guards, and whoever carried weapons for the Courts and Guilds.

And the Blades, of course.

We were supposed to be Kalimpura’s weapons. Just of late I was learning how much of the city stood outside our view. Outside our notions of justice. The Sindu and their practices. The Quiet Men, whoever they truly were. Paths within paths, hidden in plain sight.

This was knowledge that would serve me in good stead later on, but at the time it was something like becoming aware of a toothache. Nagging, painful, and not much subject to resolution at any command of mine.

Besides the merchants, servants passed. Laborers, too, often in little knots as they all left their employment for the night. Twice the sleeping carts that never stopped trundling about the city went by as well. Presumably the laborers were large among their custom. A few children out playing the dark. A self-important clerk in a green salwar kameez, pressed as if for an appearance before a judge even in this late evening.

I tried to amuse myself making up stories, but my imagination was consumed with Firesetter, while my body ached for my children. Wishing I had Mother Argai’s knack for sleeping whenever there was opportunity, I wound up watching the gate across the road and the occasional glimpses of folk moving beyond it.

From what I could tell, the Red Man was unloading the wagons. Of course he would do so. He was large and strong and could probably shift more than any three of those men. That he bothered to help them told me much about him.

In time the wagons were drawn away from my view. Shadows deepened in the courtyard as the torches guttered out or were doused. The laborers departed, querulous and bickering as old friends will be after a day of working hard.

The last person to come out was Firesetter himself. He wore a long shapeless cloak that made him seem a gigantic scarecrow who had lurched to life. A huge dark figure was probably preferable to being a huge red figure.

A very small, draggled woman followed him out. The apsara! I struggled for her name, until it came to me: Fantail.

Firesetter walked straight for me. “You are Green,” he said in a voice that rumbled into my bones.

I was shocked.

Mother Argai’s eyes flashed open, and she grinned.

“Hello, Firesetter,” I finally managed to reply.

We stared at each other in the dark like old friends who had never met before.

*   *   *

They knew of a basement two blocks down where Firesetter claimed that a quiet woman served sour beer and people rarely asked questions. Before we left, he pulled the warehouse gates shut. A rippled length of iron as big around as my two thumbs together dangled on the bars of one side of the gate. Firesetter took it in his hands and absently twisted it to bind the two sides together.

“Better than any lock,” I whispered.

“Harder to pick, too.” The apsara’s voice was much more pleasant than her aspect. I began to wonder if the dragglement were a guise or truly her appearance.