Last First Snow (16 page)

“If the cost of insurance is high, there will be less demand for Skittersill real estate, which should keep rent and land prices low at first.” Bel pointed to the plans. “But the district will change, and after a while you'll be able to realize these dreams of yours.”

Batac nodded. “We'll need time to negotiate new insurance deals. Markets develop slowly, and comprehensive property-warding agreements don't just fall out of the sky.”

“Not,” said the Major, “when you rig their auction to benefit your cronies.”

“That is a hurtful accusation,” though Batac did not seem hurt. “I don't want to delay this agreement. Neither do you, I imagine.”

“What if the new wards require comprehensive coverage as of, let's say, two weeks after they take effect?”

“Two months.”

“Within which you can send your arson squads to our homes. Two weeks is generous, to my mind.”

“I don't even have an arson squad. Six weeks.”

They sparred with words. Sometimes Elayne thought Batac or Bel might flip the table, or the King in Red, grown large in wrath, would shatter them all to pieces. But they recoiled from the brink of each new crisis, and by four o'clock they stared at one another, wordless.

Wordless until Elayne said: “It sounds like we have a deal.”

*   *   *

She outlined the terms, read them back, adjusted a few figures, clarified key definitions. Passed copies to each commissioner, which all reviewed in silence. She recognized the shape of their concern. Recapitulation came after every debate, and trembling review: did I compromise my principles because I was tired and desperate to agree to something, anything? Which of us gave more?

“I recommend,” she said, “we involve the court at this point. Judge Cafal may have questions.”

“We cannot all go to the judge,” Bill Kemal said. “People get nervous. The Major has outstanding warrants for his arrest.”

“It is true,” the Major said.

“Plus, we need to sell this agreement to the square.”

The King in Red crossed his arms. “I thought you were empowered to negotiate.”

“Negotiate, yes. Not rule.”

“If you cannot guarantee their commitment—”

“We can,” Temoc said. “The people will listen. But they must know the cause to which they are committing themselves.”

“So what do we do now?” Tan Batac asked. “Wait?”

“No,” Elayne said. Every delay increased the chance someone would step wrong. Deal or no deal, pressure grew. “The Commission needs to sell the people on the deal while we finalize it with the judge. But we can't go to Cafal alone. We need someone to stand for the crowd, someone they'll trust.”

Glances flicked across and around the table. The Major coughed.

“Why,” Temoc said, “is everyone looking at me?”

 

23

“I should talk to them,” Temoc said, “before I go.”

They stood outside the tent, in full view of the crowd.

Elayne raised one hand. “I'll set it up so you can speak in the sky.”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“I never thought you would feel stage fright.”

“I do not like speaking for myself,” he said. “I speak for something greater, or not at all. And anyway, there is no stage here.”

“You did fine last time.”

“Last time I had to stop a riot. There was no room for failure.”

“If pressure helps—if you can't sell this, I doubt your commissioners will do better, which means that the peace has failed and we're back to square one.”

“Much better.” He closed his eyes and flexed his shoulders in a way that caused his sternum to pop, a bass noise like an arm breaking. “Let's go.”

She called upon her expense account with Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao. Her blood chilled, and color drained away, leaving only wavelengths of light. The red-arms' armbands lost their bloody hue. A girl with flowers in her hair held a screaming child in her arms, and the child's face lost its flush and the daisies ceased to remind Elayne of a petal's brush against her cheek when she'd been young and almost in love, in that vanishing breath between girlhood and the War. All that faded, but power flooded her instead, which was compensation.

The Craft she wove lacked the King in Red's theatricality, which was probably for the best, considering the delicate moment.

She extended her hand to Temoc. Green and blue flame danced in her palm, tongues twisting between her fingers.

“You're on,” she said, and opened her grip. The fireflower wrapped him round, flashing emerald as Temoc's scars seized control. His eyes rolled back, his body went rigid, and his face emerged from the orange sky above.

“People of the Skittersill,” he said. “For the last two days we have discussed terms with the King in Red, and with Tan Batac. We have sought to preserve the city we know. They understand our concerns.” Murmurs of disbelief, a shout of “How?” From off to the north, laughter. Temoc laughed himself, his voice rich and full and wet despite the dry wind. “We have a deal. The structures we live in will not be sold or harmed until we wish it. They will consider our needs, our way of life. These talks have bridged a gap that seemed uncrossable. Nor is this is the end. We have shown our strength. We command respect when we stand together. Do not lose faith. I go to the Court of Craft, where I will present our deal to the judges.” “Temoc! Temoc!” A few voices raised in chant at first, a few hands lifted to the sky. Then, more. “The commissioners will explain our achievement. You will see that we have made compromises, but have not compromised. The world we want is the world we build, now, together.” Strong downbeats in that voice, hammer blows to drive his point home. Short words. A literal speech act: victory was victory because he named it so.

“Listen to the commission. Hear your leaders' words. Do not falter. Wait for my return.”

He faded from the clouds. A blue space remained where the Craft had scoured the sky clean.

“Temoc.” The chant built and spread, men's voices, women's, children's, bass alto tenor soprano, clear or reedy-rough, angry or rapturous or exultant or simply willing the future bright. “Temoc. Temoc. Temoc.”

The man, priest, Eagle Knight, father, old enemy, lowered his head. He gave no sign he heard them. To him the chant might as well have been the wind that bore it, the wind that whipped clouds and dust to plug the clear blue moment in the sky.

The red-arm cordon strained again, not this time against the protesters' anger but against their need. Wardens surrounded Temoc, and Elayne, and Tan Batac, who seemed no more than a man in a rumpled, though expensive, suit. And the King in Red of course, who stood at Elayne's elbow, and said: “He is dangerous.”

“He's on our side.”

“Now.”

“Did you hear that speech?”

“I heard a dangerous man. And the only thing one knows for certain about a dangerous man, is that he is dangerous.”

Temoc smiled and waved as the crowd chanted his name.

 

24

The judge cleared her schedule—unheard-of in Elayne's experience, but the King in Red was not a normal client and this was not a normal case. Cafal's assistant ushered them to the inner office. The judge sat behind her desk, the same deep lines graven in the same square face, the same broad mouth fixed in the same passionless disapproval. Her sharp blue raptor's gaze flicked over the three of them, lingered on Elayne, and settled at last on Temoc, who returned the stare without expression. Elayne thought about cats and kings, and wondered which was which.

Cafal addressed Elayne first. “Counselor. Have you fixed your problem?”

“Yes, your honor. The Chakal Square Committee have agreed to a compromise. They send Temoc Almotil as their representative.”

“Does he have Craft training?”

“I am a theologian,” Temoc said.

“Enough to understand the agreement under discussion?”

He nodded.

“It's irregular for someone to claim authority in my court without a document to prove it. Do you really speak for those people?”

“Would we have met with him for the last two days if he did not?”

“You're against a wall, counselor. In your situation, I might be tempted to meet with anyone willing to meet with me.”

“With all respect.” Temoc did not raise his voice, but they all looked at him. “Evidence is an echo of truth. My people have sent me, and so I am here.”

Cafal's laugh inspired neither confidence nor comfort. “Such responsibility. Good thing you have broad shoulders.”

“My shoulders have little bearing on the situation.”

“I've seen your name in the papers, Temoc Almotil. But it's interesting to learn what sort of man you are in person.”

Cafal snapped her fingers, and they stood astride Dresediel Lex. The twin suns of her eyes cast their shadows down its alleys and over its pyramids.

“Very well,” said the judge from the vast and arching sky. “Show me your deal.”

*   *   *

After two days in the Chakal Square tent, after Bel and the Major and Kapania Kemal, after the staring crowd and the brewing riot and the red-arms and the demon wind and the faces in the sky, Elayne found the afternoon's work straightforward. Not that it was easy—Cafal's gaze was implacable, her mind sharp. But she did not jag sideways in the middle of an argument to question the philosophical foundations of the Craft, nor did she object to basic terms of art.

Temoc answered questions, when questions came. Explained, patiently, about spiders, and about webs, about the Skittersill protesters' need to know their lives would not be sold out from under them. Crossed his arms, and rarely let his hand drift to the hilt of his knife.

Easy. But when the judge said, “So mote it be,” and they fell back from the dream in which three long strides could compass the distance from Worldsedge to Stonewood, into their ill-fitting bodies, when they shook hands and congratulated one another on a job almost done, when they left the Court and emerged into the late afternoon, Elayne felt less triumphant than she expected.

The victorious afterglow of the enemies' agreement in Chakal Square faded fast. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Court of Craft as traffic rolled by, as the King in Red and Tan Batac waited for a valet to bring their carriages and Temoc tried without success to hail a cab, she felt the unease of having walked a quarter mile down the wrong fork in a road. The first year she'd moved to Alt Selene she often got lost without noticing at first: with each passing block the stores seemed stranger, unfamiliar script invaded road signs, caustic spiced vapor drifted from restaurant kitchen vents, until she reached a district that might have been lifted from the sprawling metropolis of Kho Katang. And all the while she'd felt she was on the right road.

Hells. She gave, as always, too much credence to foreboding. Glandular chemistry was subject to pheromones, to context, to the angry orange sky that hung over Dresediel Lex like the sole of the proverbial other shoe.

Two carriages arrived, one crimson-lacquered for the King in Red, and Tan Batac's black and sleek, drawn by a horse that bore the same relation to normal horses that temple paintings bore to normal men: idealized, exaggerated, impossible. Both pulled off and merged into traffic, drivers whipping the horses' flanks.

Temoc waved for another cab. This one slowed a fraction before the driver remembered a pressing engagement somewhere across town and sped past, leaving a trail of dust. In another city, mud might have splattered on Temoc's pants, but late summer in Dresediel Lex was dry.

He's dangerous, Kopil had said, and he was right. But Temoc was also, if not a friend, at least a person she did not want to see stranded downtown at rush hour. “In a hurry?”

Temoc frowned up at the sky. “I hoped to return home and eat before the evening sacrifice.”

“Good luck at this hour,” she said. “The carriageway's backed up to Monicola, and Chakal Square makes surface streets even worse a gamble than usual.”

“Then I will go straight to the Square.”

“It's been a long day. How about dinner first? I know a place that's fast.”

 

25

Behind the red counter, a thin man with a wispy mustache ran a knife twice along a honing steel, then carved off the outer layers of a revolving skewer of thin-sliced roast lamb. He set the lamb onto a plate, added chopped tomatoes, hummus, slaw, and pillowy pita bread, then dropped the plate onto the counter, called “Forty-eight!” and turned back to meat and knife and honing steel. Elayne lifted the plate and her own—stoneware so thick they outweighed the food they bore—and led Temoc to a booth near the back, away from the windows.

“I've never been to a place like this,” Temoc said. A line curled from register to door. They'd snagged the second-to-last table, the others occupied by a mix of DL metropolitans: workers in denim and cotton, couples on their way to the theater, bankers eating with scavenger speed. A young suited man with a bandage on his chin swallowed wrong, choked, coughed into a napkin. “They should eat more slowly.”

“People don't come here to eat slowly.”

“I have seen coyotes dine with more grace—and coyotes must eat before something larger comes to take their food.”

“Same situation here,” Elayne said. “Or, similar. A scavenger eats fast because she's afraid of competition. These people eat fast because they're afraid someone like me will visit their desk while they're at dinner.”

“So you are the monster they fear.”

“Try the lamb. You make a sandwich with the pita, like this.” She demonstrated. He tore the pita in half with grim focus that made her imagine a much younger Temoc at anatomy lessons as a novice. Strike here to break the breastbone. Carve along this meridian. Puncture here to drain blood fast enough to induce euphoria, but not so fast as to let the sacrifice expire.