Last First Snow (8 page)

Caleb and Mina crouched on the floor beside a lamp, each holding a small stack of cards, with a larger pile between them. They dealt cards into the center by turns, and every few deals one or the other slapped the pile with a triumphant cry, matched by their opponent's wail.

“Be careful,” Temoc said. “You'll knock over the lamp.”

“Give us some credit,” Mina answered without turning.

“Hi, Dad!” Caleb waved, and Mina dealt a card and slapped the pile. “Hey, no fair.”

“If you don't mind the game, you lose.”

“Can I join?”

Caleb frowned. “We can't deal three equal piles. Someone would have eighteen.”

Temoc sat by the foot of his son's bed, legs curled beneath him. Prayer position, they called this in the old days. “I will take your cards from under you.”

“No cheating,” Mina warned.

Temoc raised his hands, and adopted as innocent an expression as he could manage.

They played Apophitan Rat Screw for a half hour more. Even without the gods' help, Temoc's reflexes were fast enough for him to seize a small stack of cards, though Caleb and Mina both seemed to have access to a side of the game denied him. Caleb sometimes slapped cards he could not possibly have read.

“Counting cards,” Temoc said, “will lead to your being thrown from most games.”

“If they catch you,” Mina pointed out.

“So the idea is don't get caught?”

“The idea is to win through virtuous play.”

“Mostly to win, though.”

No one lost that night, though Mina's pile was largest in the end. Caleb purified the cards, wrapped them in silk, and returned them to the box. So simple a contest, with no soulstuff at stake, invited only an echo of the Lady of Games, but still they observed her rites. These, at least, the boy understood. Temoc had invited Caleb to his services, and watched him from the altar. Sacrifice scared the boy. The long litanies of heroes' names and deeds that once made young Temoc hunger to prove himself, these bored his son. But Caleb understood games and their goddess, who was for all her limits the last still worshipped openly as in Dresediel Lex of old.

Caleb went to brush his teeth, and Temoc and Mina waited in the bedroom. He sat on his son's bed, and she watched painted lizards climb the wall. “It's late,” she said.

“More work today than I planned.”

“Good work?” They'd been slow to learn this skill of marriage: to take time, and let each other bring as much of the office home as needed.

“I hope. A chance for peace.”

“Caleb worried.” Meaning, I worried, but she had trouble saying that. Neither one liked to admit weakness. Luckily, they knew each other well enough to hear the unsaid words.

“I know. I'm sorry.” He smoothed the covers of his son's bed. “I appreciate his wanting to wait up.”

“Not just him,” she said, before the faucet shut off and Caleb returned.

Temoc let the boy climb into bed himself. Mina kissed their son, and so did he, and hugged Caleb back when Caleb threw his arms around Temoc's neck. There was no word in High Quechal or any other tongue Temoc knew for the way his son smelled.

“Good night. Sleep well. Dream noble dreams.”

“You too, Dad. I love you.”

“We love you, too,” he said, and they left his room, closed the door, and took the lantern with them.

Mina led him down the hall, silent.

“Good day for you?”

“I'm worried about my translation of the Oxulhat cenotaph.”

“It's fine.”

“I know. I'm still worried.”

Their bedroom lacked lizards. A painting of her family hung from the off-white walls beside a pre-Wars lithograph of his. She closed the door behind him, and set the lantern on the dresser. Lamplight painted her sandstone colors. Shade-swathed, she might have been a bas relief on an ancient temple, or one of the cave-wall paintings she studied. Beautiful, raw, and real.

“You didn't have to wait for me,” he said.

“I know.” She rushed against him like a wave, and, as always, he was swept away.

He stumbled back, tossed in her embrace, in her kiss, his hand under her shirt, on her spine. Flame flowered in her eyes. Her smooth lips found his cheek, his mouth, and still stumbling he lifted her and they fell together to the bed. They kissed again, and he held her harder, as if she might slip away and leave the world in shadow. Her fingers caught in the buttons of his shirt; he pulled hers up over her head in one motion, and she laughed.

But as they moved together on the bed, the red glow of her recalled bonfires reflected on the Major's armor, and the Wardens' silver stares. Sunrise flickered on the edge of a knife. He pulled her to him, his line out of the depths, the rope a goddess cast down so poor Temoc could climb out of the maze of his own bad choices.

He clutched her, hard—then let go, and let himself fall.

She felt him change. He watched for disappointment, but saw only a slight, sad smile before she bent close and ran her cheek along his, smooth skin against smooth. He'd never been able to grow a beard. “It doesn't need to be everything,” she said. “Just be here, now, with me. Please.”

She kissed him, and he kissed her back. Outstretched, they explored each other as if wandering through their house on a moonless midnight. No Wardens, no knives, no sacrifices, no battles to fight. Only her.

After, they lay sky-clad amid strewn pillows. His fingers trailed over her stomach, and she stretched like a cat to his touch. “We don't do that enough,” she said.

“What would be enough?”

“Let's experiment.”

“A scholar even in the sheets.”

“Mankind deserves to know. Womankind, too.”

“The boy might notice.”

“He needs to learn the facts of life someday.”

“I thought that was your job.”

“Yours.”

“I missed you.” He did not know why he said those words. They saw each other every day, unless she was on a research trip, or he on retreat. But still, they sounded right.

“I missed you, too.” Her fingers rested against the inside of his thigh, not sensual so much as there. “Sometimes I miss you even when you're around.”

“I worry.” Hard to say, harder still to hear himself say. But no one in this room could hear them.

Her hand tightened on his leg. She climbed cliffs for fun out in the desert, a regular patron too of the university climbing gym. She was strong enough to hold him. “You don't need to be a part of this, if you don't want to be.”

“I told Elayne I would bring the camp together, to compromise. It might work.”

The warmth of their sex had faded, and sweat cooled them both. That was all, he told himself: that was why goose bumps rose on her arms and on the skin of her belly beneath his fingertips.

“They need protection,” he said.

“The Wars are over, Temoc.”

“I was the gods' sword, once,” he said. “At least I can be these people's shield.”

“I'd rather you be yourself,” she said. “My husband. Father to our son.” The mattress creaked. She rolled against him, her arm across his chest, her legs clasping his. “No one can ask you to be anything but that.”

“No.” Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history.

She pulled the covers over them and slept. He pretended to sleep too, memorizing instead her imprint, the smell of her hair, the weight of her head and leg and arm.

It was enough.

Why shouldn't it be enough?

 

10

Elayne's predawn world was the color of an Iskari corpse: gray hotel room, gray curtains, gray skyline broken by the Sansilva pyramids. From dragonback the city fit a single grand design, but her fourth-floor window was not high enough to make that order clear.

She stretched, and took inventory of her body. Were her fingers less sensitive to pressure, her joints more stiff, than the day before? The Craft eroded flesh. Forty years ago, at the height of the Wars, her body and soul had been one instrument carrying out the demands of a single will. Even ten years back she hadn't felt so clear a split between mind and form. Some mornings recently she woke and moved her limbs like a puppeteer, triggering muscles one by one to rise mechanical from her sheets. Those days, these days, she waited for the twinge of betrayal in the chest or the small vessels of the brain that would signal the start of her next phase of life. Or if not life, then at least existence.

The betrayal hadn't come yet.

But no matter how carefully she kept herself, someday she would take that final stepwise jump, shed muscle and organ, and survive as—what, exactly? A skeleton, on the most prosaic level, but more. None of her friends who'd gone before her could explain the change to her satisfaction. They offered comparisons, many and myriad and no more consonant than those of blind men feeling up an elephant. How was it to see in cold heartless relief, to abandon the soft colors filtered through—created by?—jelly globe eyes for pure harsh wavelengths, to throw wide and close perception's doors at once? She could imagine such an experience, her imagination was strong, but she had no way of knowing whether her imaginings were correct.

She suspected not.

Still, the face reflected in the hotel window hid her skull well enough. Except for her teeth, which pierced white through the illusion.

The Monicola Hotel had a pool on the top floor, and a gym. Laps sounded pleasant, but Elayne had long since stopped swimming for exercise. Bone density mattered more for a Craftswoman than for other humans, since bones would stay even once she shed her meat. Not that she could afford to neglect her muscles—the chirurgeons were clear on that point. Elayne knew one scholar who still complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath fifteen years after going full skeleton.

“But you don't need to breathe,” Elayne had said, “and you have no heart.”

“Just because one does not need to breathe,” the woman replied, “does not mean one cannot feel short of breath. And the lack of a heart does not save us from heart trouble.”

So: bodyweight exercises. A little work on the bench. No cardio. Air filters be damned: in Dresediel Lex, to run was to invite the city into your lungs, and the city was a drunken guest who liked to trash the place. Elayne did medicine ball slams, lifting the heavy sphere overhead and throwing it as hard as she could into the mat, a wood-chopping motion remembered from childhood.

Mirror selves watched her.

The judge. Tan Batac. Kopil, self-styled King in Red, the sorcerer turned revolutionary turned backroom ruler of fourteen million souls. Temoc, who almost died trying to stop that transformation. Who would have died, had she not intervened for reasons she doubted to this day were sound. Sympathy for a boy caught on the wrong side of a war. A faint touch of attraction—to his will to fight for a lost cause, if nothing else—and a naive sense that such passion was worth saving for its own sake.

More mirrors. Elayne was older now, wiser perhaps, colder for certain, and used to power and its ways. She thought of Mina, Temoc's wife. Caleb, his son. Chel. A web spun around them all.

They were not her clients. They were not her problem. She had been hired to mediate between the King in Red and Tan Batac, not to bring protesters to the bargaining table. But she had burned Dresediel Lex once, and she would not do so again.

She threw the medicine ball harder and harder still, until gym mirrors buzzed in their brackets. Her arms sang with the effort, ignorant of the skeletal fate that awaited them. Though in the end, perhaps her body was no worse off than her mind. Bones would endure, at least. No way to tell how much of her self would make the jump.

She returned the medicine ball to its stand, toweled off, and walked downstairs to shower and dress for work.

 

11

“We need—”

“We need,” Tan Batac interrupted, then bit off a piece of doughnut, chewed twice, and swallowed before repeating: “We need those people gone. Dispersed. Out of Chakal Square. That's our goal.”

Elayne glared at him across the conference table wreckage of disemboweled pastries and half-full coffee cups. Large meetings were anathema to plain talk and quick decisions, so of course Kopil and Tan Batac had brought three associates each this morning, henchmen and -women who sat and sipped good coffee turned bad by conference room alchemy. At least they remained silent, for the most part.

Batac's entourage were human, all men in various stages of corpulence and decay. One was a Craftsman in his own right, a former Varkath Nebuchadnezzar associate gone in-house. Kopil's group included an Atavasin snakeling, its scaly body coiled around a transport revenant; a golem bearing a vision-gem for some distant associate; and a young woman from his risk management department. A more diverse crowd than Batac's but no more reassuring, the young woman's stare as alien as the snakeling's gold eyes, the golem lenses, the light within the gem. Kopil's crowd, naturally, set the Skittersill team ill at ease, and Batac had spent the last several hours grandstanding for their benefit.

“We need,” she repeated, putting more ice into the words this time, “to understand our BATNA.”

Batac blinked.

Kopil translated: “Best alternative to negotiated agreement. The best possible result if we walk away from the table.”

“We know the worst,” Elayne said, leaving Batac no time to cut in. “We force the Skittersill's transformation, the Chakal Square crowd resists, reality ruptures, unbound demons spill through, kill everything, and contort local space-time into an unrecognizable hellscape. What's our best alternative, though? Once we know that, we know our fallback position.”

“Best alternative.” Batac took another bite of doughnut.

“We can change the Skittersill wards,” Kopil said, “to a limited degree without causing a rupture. My people ran the numbers.” He nodded to the young woman, who opened a folder and spoke without consulting the papers within.