Last First Snow (38 page)

“Before you try to kill me,” Elayne said, with slight emphasis on try, because it always helped to plant seeds of doubt in a potential adversary, “you should know I've come to help.”

“You have come to join us against your master.”

“I'm not a fighter, Temoc. Not anymore. I'm here to save people, like I saved you. Like I saved your son.”

That broke the paladin's facade. “Caleb,” he said. “Is he—”

“Well, no thanks to you. Golems chased him and Mina from the Skittersill after you left. They're fine.”

“Where are they now?”

“I don't think I should give you that information.”

“So you have come to torment me.”

“Hardly.” She looked from him, to the crowd, and back. In a blink, she saw the gods gathering too, through lightning-seaweed lines of Craft: not manifest, though awake enough to listen. “I've come to offer you a trade. Tell your people to leave. As many of them as will go.”

“And in exchange?”

“In exchange I save the Skittersill. Or try.”

“I don't understand.”

“The King in Red will strike tomorrow morning. Your sacrifice made him angry. He thinks the God Wars have come again, and he will destroy you. He'll use gripfire. It will catch, and spread. The Skittersill's undefended now—we're inside the insurance renegotiation window. People will die whose only crime is living near the Square. The Skittersill will burn. I can't save the Square, but I can save the surrounding district, and the people there, if you help me. Otherwise, tomorrow, the fire starts, and who knows what Tan Batac will build in place of all that's burned. You'll have lost in every way.”

“The gods will help us.”

“Can they save the Skittersill and fight the King in Red at once?” And addressing him she addressed the crowd, and the gods.

Temoc did not answer. Neither did they.

“Caleb will recover,” she said, after too much silence passed. “He's young. Mina's safe, and angry, and hurt.”

“What do you need?” he said.

“The Skittersill. I have to know it. Perfectly. Intimately. I have to know it like someone who has lived here for sixty years. Backstreets. Shortcuts. Rooftops at sunset. Sound of rain in gutters. The color of the alley cats, and their secret names. I need the dream of this place.”

“Is that all?”

She had no patience for sarcasm. “I need men and women who know this ground, and these people. The process is dangerous, but I think I can protect them.”

“You think.”

“We will be a fire brigade in a firefight. There is a limit to how much safety I can offer. But I need volunteers.”

His chin sank to his chest. It might have been a nod.

“He'll go.” Chel's voice. Elayne glanced up, startled by the interruption, to see Chel shove Tay forward. He glared from Elayne to Chel, shaking his head. “He knows the Skittersill as well as anyone. Born and raised here. The other red-arms too, Zip and them. They'll help you.”

“What about you?” Tay said it first, so Elayne didn't have to.

“I'll stay,” she said. “I started this. I'll see it through.”

Elayne did not interrupt the pause that passed between Chel and Tay, did not speak to draw their eyes from each other. At last, Tay's shoulders slumped. He nodded. He took Chel in his arms, kissed her, broke away, and walked toward Elayne.

“We will send the others,” Temoc said. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

He offered her his hand. It was clean, though firelight dyed it red.

They were close enough for him to whisper and be heard. “I had no choice.”

“I don't believe you,” she replied, with false conviction.

She left him standing on his grass mats before his altar, beneath the stars.

 

57

Elayne walked on air through Chakal Square to the meeting tent, with Tay beside her. Others followed: red-arms and interested faithful, armored hooligans loyal to the dead Major. She kept her glyphs' starfire damped, but still she glowed.

“You didn't fly when you came to us the first morning,” Tay said.

“I prefer to walk on the ground. It's easier.”

“Why aren't you doing that now?”

“I promised I would not set foot in Chakal Square. My word binds me.”

“We'll leave the Square, then?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

They reached the meeting tent. Night dyed the deep green canvas almost black. The tent had served its purpose during those long tense negotiation days, but tonight it would only block out the sky, and she needed all the starfire and moonlight she could catch. With a sweep of one hand she shredded the canvas and toppled the poles. The circle she'd etched into stone glinted silver.

Elayne crossed the circle and settled once more to ground. Gods cursed and threatened, but she ignored them. Those Wars were long done, at least for her.

For some, they would never end.

Tay joined her in the circle, stepping high across the cold flames as if climbing from a boat to shore. He turned, and blinked, like a man who'd walked long in the mist and stood now in the sun. “It feels different.”

“This circle is not a part of Chakal Square. Here, I can protect us without breaking my word.” She drew her work knife, and lightning sparked along its edge.

“What should I do?”

“Stand still.”

The limits of the ward were set, burned into stone and notional space. To change them she would have to wipe away the ward and begin again, for which she had neither strength nor time. So small a space, with so many left outside. But large enough, she hoped.

“First,” she said, “I assert my right to claim insurance for the Skittersill.” She carved a circle seven meters in diameter within the ward, and inside that a second circle, concentric and three meters across. That circle she tied to the contract she'd forced Purcell to let her sign, and through that contract to her representation pact with Tan Batac. “And then I prove I am who I claim.” To the second circle she added a few drops of her blood—always err on the conservative side with human fluids. A little goes a long way.

“Why do you need to prove that?”

“I will draw a lot of soulstuff through these circles tomorrow. The powers I invoke will use every loophole to keep from honoring their agreement—including claiming I am not myself.”

“Why do you need us?”

She looked up from her knife's trail. Tay alone stood within the circle. Others had gathered outside: red-arms mostly, some she remembered from that first day when they tried to bar her access to the camp. A withered and scarred man. A giant who made even Tay look scrawny. A woman with short hair dyed shocking red.

“Come in,” she said. “Step across the line.”

“It's fine,” Tay added.

They entered, each by each, the red-haired woman most decisive and the giant the most hesitant.

“You're friends of Chel's.”

“I am,” the giant rumbled. “Zip.”

“That's your name.”

“It's what they call me,” he said. “My name's Andrew, really.”

“Not all of us know her,” the red-haired woman said. “She asked for people from all over. I used to work with the Kemals, up by Market and Slaughter.”

Elayne let her work-knife fade and her glyphs dull to pale tracks on her skin. Even the shadows of her suit grew shallow. She looked almost human when she was done. Normal enough, she hoped, for them to believe her.

“I need your dreams.”

*   *   *

Elayne's deals gave her power to preserve the Skittersill. Now she only needed to explain, in precise and Craftwork terms, what the Skittersill was. The insurance contract stipulated which properties it covered, yes, but tomorrow Aberforth and Duncan would fight those definitions. This building on fire could be any building on fire. Why should we save it?

She had maps, but maps were poor echoes of reality, their accuracy open to attack. She had to feel the Skittersill as if it were her own flesh. She needed a lifetime's walking of its streets.

No way to get there in a night. Fortunately, she could cheat.

They sat cross-legged around her, the first twelve: Tay and Andrew-called-Zip and the red-haired woman named Hannah, and scarred Cozim. With a fine brush and silver ink she drew a glyph-eye on each one's brow. Others joined, and sat, and had their brows inscribed. Tay flinched at the bristles' touch. “It tickles.”

It would burn, soon enough.

“Eyes closed,” she said, and sat in the center of her innermost circle.

Zip spoke first. “How long you want us to sit like—”

She closed her eyes, and they fell through sleep into nightmare.

Which nightmare didn't matter: so many to choose from, and knowing each she could find the next most basic terror and follow it down into the marrow-fears of the race. Love itself could be a nightmare—a laugh, a touch, a feeling of contentment and loyalty to block out life and light and even her own name, love become one of those old Iskari prisons where they threw men and women to rot without light or sky or anything but the crush of the jailer's boot heel on hands thrust through the slot in the door through which they slid tin plates of bad food, and she followed that nightmare further down to burial, her body stiff, dead maybe, as shovelfuls of earth fell into her mouth, onto her eyes, weight that grew and grew and grew and she could not breathe or move or see as they packed it down, dragged heavy rocks over the distant surface and smoothed it and struck it with their shovels and she felt nothing but heard the impact and no matter how she strained she could not move and then the worms came and the bugs that burrowed and the whole host of crawling hungry things, and still further down she fell into that single sharp terror, I am being eaten, but so basic that there was no referent to I, only the chewing, the tearing of flesh, the self swallowed, to—

There.

She hung in the central fear, tangent to all human minds at once. There was no geography in this place that was not a place, but topology, yes, a web of minds each of which contained its own webs of minds, a billion-dimensional space all but impossible to navigate untrained and unwarded.

But Elayne was trained, and warded, and knew the secret ways of fear.

The drawn glyphs called to her, the eyes she'd scribed herself, and she reached out with a hundred hands, each one a mercy, like a sage from the mountains west of the Shining Empire, generous and omnipresent.

She found Zip screaming, chained to an anchor that fell to crushing depths, and took his hand and broke his chains. She found Cozim sobbing in bed beside a woman's skeleton that still wore scraps of rotting flesh, and lifted him from his failure. She found Eleanor tearing at worm-flowers that sprouted wriggling from her belly, pulling each up by its roots only to draw forth gobs of her own meat and corded nerves—until Elayne tore her free of herself.

As she wandered the nightmares, to her surprise she found another, without her eye-glyph but of immense gravity: Temoc, who stood over an altar where his son lay bleeding.

She did not hold out her hand to him. He did not ask for it. But he reached into his chest, drew forth the Skittersill in miniature, and passed it to her.

“Thank you,” he said, and turned from her back to his own private fear.

They hung together between dreams, Elayne and Tay and Cozim and Zip and Hannah and the rest. “Show me your city,” she said.

And their city took shape.

There was no single Skittersill, as there was no single sun, no single moon, no single god. But a city grew around them nonetheless.

Their dreams were grand and old and private and new, their roots deep and facets many, held together by memory, analogy, and metaphor rather than logic. For Tay the Skittersill began with the smell of dust and fried plantain, with streetcorner sweetness and cheap drink, with street dances each lunar new year, brawling and turning cartwheels to the rapid beat of a brass band. For Hannah it began with fear and a breath of air from the distant sea, the feeling of sudden freedom. The images slid through Elayne's mind, fast and fluid. And she added her own memories, her own dreams, and Temoc's: the city seen by a preacher to deserted rooms, through ten years of depression and alcohol, two decades more of search and prayer and hunger, followed by twelve years of love. Ten thousand sunrises give or take: some found him streetside with feet in gutter, head hanging sickly between his knees, some streamed through glass windows as he donned priestly regalia and raised false knife before a sparse but curious crowd, some called him from feathered sleep to wake in Mina's arms. Sunsets too, and music: horse hooves and rain and three-string fiddle, the song of soapbox politicians, drums on stage and in dancer's veins, drums in his wife's flesh and his own chest.

These dreams would take years to infiltrate her waking mind, years she did not have. But there was another way.

Her eyes drifted open, and her hand rose to her chest, drew her work knife from the glyph above her heart. Dreams weighed down her arms. The stars above thronged with all the monsters Quechal myths had planted there. Spiders the size of trash bins skittered around her, spinning webs. Chakal Square was a charnel house, an orgy, an inferno. The city crumbled into ash, built itself again, was knocked to pieces by flaming serpents taller than the tallest building, perished in a single blinding light, towered black and invincible above. A Craftswoman's mind was an edge for cutting her will into the world, but an edge could scrape as well as cut, and this she did now, scraping away years of judgment to dream and wake at once.

She touched her knife to stone and drew the first line. Then she drew another, crossing it, and a third.

A map unfolded from her blade. Set beside surveyors' charts this map was warped and imprecise, streets crossing at the wrong points—if the lines she drew were streets at all. She cut a long curve sharp as a sickle, and lines like rays from it, that might have been the Forty-first Skyway. This was no navigational aid, nor was it art exactly. But it was useful, it was real. Working, she saw the city, each crossing and square painted with memory: this corner good for afternoon preaching, that alley where migrant workers slept if they'd stayed in town too late to risk the crossing back to Stonewood, this the square Mina painted three times in watercolor, that the rooftop with the hammock where Tay and Chel slept in good weather and happier times.