Last First Snow (15 page)

“If you want to piss me off, you've succeeded.”

“I want a name. In exchange, I help you and your brother. My firm has contracts with accounting Concerns. We'll send a consultant to get your books in order. Steady hand at the tiller. You'll do fine.”

“How, if I feed my clients to the Wardens?”

“I'm not the Wardens,” she said. “And your client won't know you've told me. She might not even stop paying you.”

“Why do you think she's a she?”

“Why wouldn't she be?”

Dana had smoked her cigarette to the filter. She crushed it out in the ashtray, and leaned back. “You're working for the King in Red, but not the Wardens. You want to find my client, but you don't want to stop her. You don't make sense, Ms. Kevarian.”

“I have friends in the Skittersill,” she said. “They will burn in the anger your client wants to fan. They need help.” She did not look at Dana's brother. “Your client won't know I got her name from you. And I think my fifteen minutes are almost up. If you wish to accept my offer, best do it before the cavalry bursts through that door.”

A clock ticked through the ensuing pause.

Dana took a piece of paper from her desk, and a pen, scrawled a name on the paper, and passed it, folded, to Elayne. Elayne snuffed out her cigarette and read the name printed there, in firm capitals: Kal Alaxic. With an address.

“Thank you,” Elayne said. “I'll send the accountant.”

“Get gone.”

She warded her ears before she stepped out into the pounding noise. Mechanics watched her walk to and through the door. The night swallowed her.

Up in the mountains, a dry wind howled.

 

21

The wind blew dry and hot all night. It rolled down distant slopes and dried across a thousand desert miles, until at last it bore nothing but itself, not even dust. Children in clapboard houses sweltered through sandstorm nightmares. Fights in bars by Monicola Pier boiled onto the street, human beings transformed to tangles of fists and feet and teeth. Even Wardens paused before breaking up brawls that brutal. Better wait for the drunks to bleed it out. Hospital surgeons sharpened scalpels and took drugs to stay awake.

Temoc stared at his ceiling and snatched for the frayed edges of the dream he'd left behind. Fire. Screams. Death. And above it all, a sense of grim inevitable fate.

Mina curled beside him, and uncurled, and yowled catlike in her sleep.

He stood without waking her, and walked their house alone. Caleb's door had drifted open. Temoc considered going in to watch his son asleep. Decided against it, for the same reason he'd not woken Mina. No need to inflict this wakefulness on another.

There were prayers for such nights and such winds. The sky outside the kitchen windows was yellow-orange and higher than usual—the sorcerous clouds Craftsmen used to protect their precious starlight from the city's glare had retreated from the dirt. Still the wind blew on. A bad omen. People waking in Chakal Square tonight would fear for their souls. These winds issued from wounds in the world. Demons rode them.

He drank three glasses of water, which did not help. His heartbeat slowed.

He stepped out of the kitchen and saw Caleb at the dinner table, watching him. He swore, and drew back a step. An apparition? A message from the gods?

But the boy said, “I couldn't sleep,” and was his son after all.

“Hells, Caleb. We should teach you to hunt. You won't even need a weapon. Just do that to the deer, and they'll fall down dead.”

The boy didn't laugh. “I'm sorry. I thought you saw me.”

“Would you like some water?”

“Yes, please.”

Temoc poured him a glass, and refilled his own. They each dipped a finger in the water, and shed a drop on the table.
Water in the desert
, Temoc said, and Caleb replied,
a generous gift.
They sat, shadows inside shadows, encased in dry, charged air. “Do you get bad dreams, Dad?”

“I do.”

“Do they scare you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There are two kinds of dreams. Most are false, with no more substance than a lie. Some dreams are true, but truth is barely more substantial. A dream can neither wound nor kill. Why fear it?”

“Mom says dreams connect. Mom says we're all tied together in dreams, and sometimes stuff spreads from one person to another.”

“Perhaps.”

“So you're not scared?”

“I am not.”

“Then why are you awake?”

Because, Temoc thought, fear and dread are not the same. Because to say I'm scared suggests that something has scared me, that I know the shape of the beast that chases me down dream corridors. That my fear has an object, and that object has a name, and this name is known or at least knowable to me. One cannot fear a dry hot wind, one cannot fear to lie in bed awake beside one's sleeping wife, one cannot fear one's child. To say I fear suggests that something makes me fear, and I have never yet encountered a thing I could not break with my bare hands.

And yet this boy watches me with my own eyes under my own brows above his mother's cheeks, and when he questions me I reel. I am Temoc. Once a goddess set her palm upon my brow, once I slew a scorpion the size of a mountain, once I fought demons to a standstill on a bridge over a chasm as deep as death. I preach to those who stand against the King in Red. I am Temoc, father, and husband, priest, and I cannot be all those men at once. What father leaves his wife and child to seek war? What father sets aside his son for an ideal?

Temoc leaned across the table, and ruffled Caleb's hair. The boy squinched up his face and pushed Temoc's hand away. Wiry, lacking Temoc's bulk—but still strong. Strong enough.

“I'm worried about you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I hope so,” Temoc said. He lifted the boy from the chair and embraced him. Caleb squirmed, then understood, and hugged his father back.

Outside, that dry, demonic wind blew on.

 

22

The next morning the sun rose. The tide rolled in. Airbuses drifted overhead. Stoves burned scrambled eggs, and cooks cursed and opened windows to let out smoke. Downtown highway traffic ran nose to bumper, slower even than usual due to rubbernecking near Chakal Square. An unlucky accountant's carriage crashed into a fruit cart. Lemons rolled across pavement, squashed under hooves and wheels. Zest and spray mixed with sweat, horseflesh, hot wood, pavement, shit. The city groaned like a revenant new-woken on the slab, and shambled forth hungry for food it lacked a tongue to name.

In Chakal Square, the parties met. Elayne, nursing a skull-fracturing headache after last night's adventure, strode down the red-arm's cordon at the King in Red's right hand. Tan Batac, to the skeleton's other side, walked briskly—he must have slept well. He seemed to be the only one. Weakened by dawn, the hot wind still dried skin and robbed spit from open mouths. It even chased away the smog, leaving a sky that could not be called blue—pale, only, the color prophets gave death's horse, with vague tones of orange and green and threatening thunder. The crowd did not mutter, did not growl. It watched.

There were no speeches. If Kopil had tried the voice-in-the-sky routine today, Temoc could not have calmed the people. They would have mobbed at once.

Temoc ushered them into the tent, and again they sat, and again the oculus began its slow progression—though today the sunlight ellipse seemed an accusing eye. Each side watched the other, exhausted and uncertain and at bay. They drank water and waited as the day forced itself alight.

No one was more surprised than Elayne when things began to move.

*   *   *

She asked the first question, yes, but she could not be held responsible for what happened next. “We left yesterday with Mr. Kemal's spider,” she said. “And the dangers of miscommunication. Perhaps we could expand on that theme: have each side present the other's position, as they see it, with as little emotion as possible.”

Temoc objected to the idea that one should set aside emotion when discussing homes and families. The Major refused to describe Tan Batac's goals as anything less than apocalyptic. Elayne resigned herself to another day of shouted slogans and table-pounding, but few commissioners seemed to share the Major's passion. Even Bel frowned as he railed about revolution. After the Major, each speaker took a calmer position, until Kapania Kemal summed up: “You want to tear down our home, and build a place where none of us can live.”

The King in Red's laugh held little humor. “Change is inevitable. Even you commissioners are new to the Skittersill. The Kemals have a warrior's clan name,
ke
, and Techita's family were freeholding artisans before the Wars. Bel's people have lived here since first settlement, but the very fact she calls you neighbors proves how much the Skittersill has changed. Hells, you've enlisted Temoc Almotil to your cause, and I remember when the priests of house Al came this far south only to choose sacrifices. So you'll forgive me if your evocations of community and home sound rich. You want to protect yourselves from change, just like every conservative since the dawn of time. You're on the losing side of history.”

Hal Techita struck the table with his stick. “Typical Craftsman's argument, thaumocratic and reliant on false historical progressivism without a shred of—”

“Hal,” Bel said, and Techita stopped. “We can't make this about philosophy or we'll fight until the stars fall. You and I disagree on these questions—as do Tan Batac and the King in Red. Our problem is practical, not ideological.”

“These gentlemen”—and Techita spared no scorn on that word—“seem to disagree. We explain our position and they can't even repeat it back without reference to the grand shape of history.”

“Then let me try,” said Tan Batac—the first words he'd spoken this morning, and still with that small smile, still with fingers interlaced over his belly, like one of those cherub-cheeked porcelain sages from the Shining Empire.

Hal eyed him warily.

“Our main difference,” Batac said, “is that you care about preserving the Skittersill as it is now, and I care about how the Skittersill must change to survive the next three decades, or five. You think I want to wire your spiderweb. I think you want to freeze it: to lock your current life in place, to keep it from changing.”

“We want it to change,” Kapania said. “Organically.”

“What do you mean by organic? Do you mean slowly? Because living beings move fast. Fifty years ago Dresediel Lex was a theocracy; today we're not. Do you mean, in hermetic isolation? Because I can't think of any living system disconnected from all others. Maybe those blind fish you get in caves, almost—but I don't think you want to be a blind fish in a cave, even if that were an option, which it's not. You're in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world.”

“There's a difference between evolution,” Bel said, “and decree. Your plans—” She waved at the maps spread on the table. “You want luxury apartments where we live. Some of these compounds have been inhabited for six hundred years.”

“But haven't those houses changed in six hundred years?”

“Sure. After fires and disasters, after victories and marriages and tragedies.” She looked about the circle for confirmation. Even the Major nodded. “Things change. We care for lives lived here, now. Not for some crystal utopia.”

“But you don't mind if the Skittersill becomes a utopia over time.”

“No.”

“So we really disagree,” he said, “on the question of how to regulate the transformation.”

“Sure.”

“Do you have any suggestions?”

And so, two hours into the second day, the talks began.

*   *   *

Elayne took notes. They broke for small group meetings, they broke for water, they broke for lunch, they broke to stand outside under the angry sky and contemplate the possibility of failure.

“I don't believe it,” Kopil said. “They're talking.”

“They were talking already,” Batac said, with a self-satisfied grin. “But we're talking together now.”

“They will seek concessions, you realize.”

Batac searched the crowd, and nodded at some secret knowledge he gleaned there. “I can handle my investors, within reason.”

Elayne tried to shake her sense things were going right for the wrong reasons.

Back in the tent, uncertainty receded. Concessions were offered, compromises raised. If Elayne hadn't warded the tent herself she would have suspected a secret hand of usurping the delegates' wills—but there was no arcane Craft in play. The parties had simply decided to cooperate, like a cloud deciding to rain.

“You want to protect the Skittersill,” Tan Batac said. “You don't want it to become a museum.”

“The structures should remain,” Bel said, “and rent should be guaranteed.”

“What about bare spaces, decaying buildings? Do you want abandoned houses to stay abandoned when we could replace them with something new?”

“No,” Hal said. “We care about living beings, not dead wood.”

“I would be comfortable,” Bel said again, “if abandoned or otherwise damaged structures could be rebuilt, repurposed, even sold fee simple.”

“So long,” Bill Kemal added, “as owners are forced to protect their property. Or I bet we'll face a season of suspicious fires.”

“What do you mean,” said Batac, “by ‘protect'?”

“Full fire suppression, earthquake and flood resistance. Pest control.”

“Especially against lava termites.”

“Expensive,” Batac said. “Few insurance Concerns will offer such a guarantee.”

“Someone will,” the Major said. “Or what good is your vaunted free market?”

“These terms will chase off anyone who wants to buy Skittersill land.”