Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (44 page)

The ship hailed from Stass Port, then, and was sworn out to a female merchant. As the ship drew in closer, the name came clear:
Dema’s Legacy,
in a fine gold-laced paint impressive all on its own.

Not the most original name, but Dema, as Eredion recalled, wasn’t the most original woman. She went by what had worked in the past, drove her staff hard, and kept company with nobles whenever possible—climbed into bed with them, if it meant better deals. She wasn’t the only merchant to keep a small staff of kathain on hand, in case a potential client had desires she couldn’t satisfy; but she
was
the only one who refused to source those kathain from the katha villages.

That Dema had taken on the transport of the Sessin liaison meant a significant rise in her overall fortunes; that Lord Sessin had chosen Dema for this contract suggested a number of interesting possibilities, especially in the wake of Allonin’s recent activities along the coast.

Weighted lines arced over the rail of the incoming ship, thudding onto the stone of the wharf. Dockhands went about their business with boathooks, baffles, and rope; the musicians broke into a dockside work ditty—under Eredion’s stern glare, the singers kept the lyrics clean—and the crowd gaped and pressed in against the line of guards.

A scuffle broke out somewhere behind him, ending in an aggrieved yelp and bout of cursing. Eredion stood rigid and still, not looking back to see what had happened; Oruen had been smart enough to provide his most experienced guards. They could handle a crowd, and most of the selected guards had survived under Ninnic. They knew about intimidation and how to hit for maximum pain but minimum damage.

Eredion took some time to look over the ship. Glossy black, three-masted and sleek, with a green and white diamond pattern along the top edge of the hull. And
big.
Larger than he thought his own transport had been; and that about summed up his own knowledge on the matter. He dimly remembered sailors, during his one, long ago trip north, trying to explain terminology and function.

They’d eventually given up and told him to just stay out of the damn way and puke over the leeward rail, as he recalled, both of which orders he’d been more than happy to oblige them on. Doubtful he’d react any better on the homeward trip.

A baby wailed somewhere in the crowd. Gulls grackled and swung in abstract patterns overhead, not in the least impressed by ceremony. One of the pipers broke off playing to swear as he scrubbed a handkerchief frantically over the smear of white dribbling down his formerly immaculate blue silk shirt.

Eredion bit the tip of his tongue, hard, to stop himself from smiling, and kept his attention soberly on the gangplank now rattling into contact with the wharf. The work ditty turned into a northern-style ceremonial without lyrics. Designed to help a parade keep a consistent marching pace more than for audible beauty, it could loop damn near indefinitely. For the sake of his own sanity, Eredion had ordered the musicians to alternate between three different such arrangements, then switch to a fourth as they entered palace grounds proper.

For just a moment, the ship
loomed,
impossibly huge. The gangplank stretched up an infinite distance. The crack of the banners became menacing; the murmurs of the crowd turned into a rolling grumble of thunder.

Eredion blinked, scolding his imagination back into a corner, and everything shrank back into its proper proportion.
This is my own blood, at some remove, about to come marching down that ramp,
he told himself.
Not an enemy. As such.

A tall man clad all in black appeared at the top of the ramp. Wind rippled the looser folds of his outfit; his dark hair had been shaven to stubble nearly as tight as that of the guards waiting behind Eredion. He wore no visible jewelry, and his feet were covered with a dark, sturdy cloth wrapping.

“Iishin,”
Eredion murmured under his breath, his heart sinking. Lord Fimre, apparently, was prepared to deliver rather more of a show than Eredion had expected.
Godsdamned politics. The king won’t be able to match this—which is the whole point, of course.

The crowd went gradually silent.

Between one breath and the next, the
iishin
went from statue-rigid to a twisting blur of motion: flipping ass over elbows down the gangplank with perfect precision, bounding through somersaults at the high point of each arc. The musicians faltered into chaos, each one staring in unabashed astonishment.

A heavy drumming began immediately, coming from the ship.

The
iishin,
reaching the dockside, continued his display of agility in a straight line—Eredion had already shifted clear of the acrobat’s path—landing, with an impressively loud
thump,
exactly level with Eredion’s new position, then became rigid as a statue again. The crowd began to applaud, but their cheers trailed off as the drummers filed down the ramp.

If
simple
described the
iishin’
s outfit,
gaudy
would apply here. Each drummer sported hundreds of faceted clear glass beads sewn into his emerald-green sleeves and leggings. Livid green and white lines curled over the drummers’ faces: each a different pattern, all impressively barbaric to northern eyes.

Mad porcupine arrays of rigid metal spikes protruded along the curves of their ears, each spike tipped with a tiny rattle. Between the rattles and the masses of tiny beads clicking together, it sounded as though the sea had volunteered as backdrop to their beat.

The drums themselves ranged successively in size: the first in line had self-striking
chichi
in one hand and a
shabaca
rattle in the other. At the end of the line came a massive
shaska,
carried by an equally massive man whose deep ebony skin ran stark contrast to the dozens of bleached-white braids swinging nearly to his waist. He used no strikers for the shaska; his enormous hands were adorned with intricate patterns—not paint, but tattoos.

Oh gods. He brought a druu—a master drummer.

The other Families, when they sent their permanent liaisons, would be rivalry-bound to top this display. Hard to do, with only three living master drummers to draw from, and one of those a fiercely independent man who refused to be involved in a display like this. The other was a woman, which would stick unendurably in F’Heing and Darden throats.

I forgot how insane the south can get about scoring status points. And the northerns aren’t going to understand what this is about at all.

Eredion kept a polite smile on his face. There would be at least three more acts before Lord Fimre appeared, which meant clearing the dock and revising travel plans substantially.

He turned his head to catch the eye of the guard captain; lifted his chin towards the sweepers.

The captain nodded, then motioned urgently to the sweepers. Busy goggling at the drummers, the boys took a moment to notice the signal. Eredion heard the captain swearing under his breath; then one of the boys glanced up and elbowed his companions hard.

The sweepers sprang into panicked motion. Two of the boys leapt to scatter the salt-sand mixture across the road, yelling, “Shass-shass! Shass-shass!” in voices that quickly steadied from raw fear to a more assured arrogance. The two remaining sweepers frantically brushed the grit away to the sides of the path.

Four guards, two on each side of the road, paced the sweepers to keep them from being bothered. Two more guards waited to escort the iishin.

The first of the drummers, a slight woman with more bone than curve to her frame, pranced onto the dockside, rattling the
shabaca
and
chichi
above her head in a precise pattern. A moment later the
iishin
sprang forward into another series of full body flips.

His guard escort had been watching the drummer instead of the iishin. They scrambled to keep up, prompting a few snickers from the watching crowd. The lead drummer shook her two instruments in front of her chest, producing a derisive hissing sound, before resuming her previous rhythm.

Not
good. The lead of a drum line was called the mocker; she existed to make fun of everything she saw.
Mokoi—
mocker songs—would magnify that undignified scramble into a rout, and those songs would be heard from Water’s End to Aerthraim Fortress within a month.

Jugglers came down the ramp next, four of them, each diamond-checkered fool’s suit sporting a different shade of red set against black. Each face was painted with a flat white oval, their eyes exaggerated by wide black outlines. Their bare scalps gleamed in the sun.

Once they were all on the level ground of the dock, small white balls began popping back and forth between them, each juggler still moving forward, eyes forward, hands reaching out to catch balls thrown from behind or before with uncanny accuracy.

Eredion suspected that closer to the palace, the display would grow more complex, as would the drumming and the acrobatics. This was all relatively easy stuff, enough to astonish the commoners, nothing suitable for impressing a king.

He risked a glance at the tight-faced guard captain standing next to him.

“Captain,” he said, pitching his voice with care, “the king isn’t expecting—”

“Already sent a runner,” the captain said without taking his grim stare from the unfolding spectacle.

“Good,” Eredion said, some worry leaving him. The palace wouldn’t be
entirely
unprepared for this invasion.

Four pipers descended the ramp, their warbling adding another layer to Eredion’s already splitting headache. First in line carried a single-pipe with a shrill tone, the second a more complex two-pipe
alli,
then the three-pipe
bene,
and finally a four-pipe
oiu.
Each set of pipes ran significantly larger; the
oiu
player rivaled the
druu
in height, if not bulk, and the long, curved pipes of his deep-toned
oiu
nearly reached his knees.

Their costumes, jewelry, and face-paintings were as fantastical as the rest, a riot of green and gold, black and white, with a splash of red from firetail bird feathers woven through their long braids. Their boots clicked as they walked, producing a distinctive sound: these were
talloi
pipers. Not likely most northerns had ever seen any
talloi
dances; not likely they’d forget the impressive barrage of staccato clicking once they’d heard it.

“We’re not going to have enough damn guards if this goes much longer,” the guard captain beside Eredion muttered.

“My fault,” Eredion said, not taking his eyes from the top of the ramp. His heart hammered in dreadful anticipation of what would show up next. “I didn’t think he’d go this flashy.”

The guard captain snorted. “We’ll be seeing this with every damn southern noble waltzes in here now?”

“No. Only the incoming official Family liaisons, right now. But each one will try to top the previous.” And once the liaisons were established, the high-ranking nobles might well breeze in without ceremony, if the overall status suited them; or bid for status with an extravagance that beggared this display.

“What happens if two of ‘em come in at once?”

“Gods help us,” Eredion said fervently; that sounded like
exactly
the type of status-game F’Heing and Darden would engage in.

The captain grunted and fell silent as more figures appeared at the top of the deck. To Eredion’s vast relief, these wore striped emerald and sand-tan tunics over black leggings, and balanced black, lacquered-leather boxes atop their heads. These were the ornamental baggage carriers: the boxes would hold little to nothing of any weight or value. This was more display than practicality, but it meant the
jii
were due out next, to scatter treats and low-weight coins among the waiting crowd.

Eredion hoped that didn’t cause a stampede. He prayed Fimre was intelligent enough to realize that anything significant by way of coinage would cause an immediate riot here.

“How much more they fit in that damn ship?” the captain muttered.

“Four to six
jii—
gifters,” Eredion said, “then Lord Fimre, followed by four to ten baggage carriers—I’m guessing they’ll use the full ten. After that, any kathain he brought along—no more than four of those, and six guardsmen. Possibly a trainee or two, but I shouldn’t think so.”

“The guards are at the
end?
Not with Lord Fimre?”

Eredion shook his head as the
jii
appeared at the head of the ramp. “That would imply Lord Fimre can’t handle any trouble that comes along the route.”

The captain snorted and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, “Insane fucking southerners.”

Eredion hesitated, knowing he ought to keep his mouth shut. By southern thinking, being underestimated was an enormously beneficial thing. But he’d been in Bright Bay long enough to feel a strong sense of divided loyalties, so he said, his tone carefully neutral, “Don’t make the mistake of seeing only a flashy show here, Captain.”

The captain shot him a sharply understanding stare, then went back to watching the parade with much closer attention.

Eredion kept his expression placid and didn’t explain further. Let the captain figure out for himself that this entire retinue, from iishin to the last of the guards, very probably carried a variety of hidden weapons and boasted more combat training—even experience—than most mercenaries. Let the captain work out for himself that once all the decoration came off at the end of the day, the men and women underneath all the paint and barbaric display would be unrecognizable even to those now watching.

The captain swore softly, his former cynical contempt gone. From the sound if it, he’d just realized all of that, and more: that some of the retinue would be melting into the general population of the city over the next few days, with no hope in all the hells of even a Hidden keeping track of their movements. Eredion suspected that at least one of the parade passing by him would be a professional assassin, another a master thief.

“Thanks for the warning,” the captain said, not in the least sarcastic, and motioned urgently for a waiting messenger to come over.