Tinder Stricken (19 page)

Movement flickered past the bamboo leaves —
a distant fleck of imperial red.

“Stop,” Esha hissed. “Guards!”

With a flick of her hand, Atarangi slid the
plant into a cloak pocket. The shaggy edge of the cloak fell back
against her arm just as a lead guard rounded the bamboo stalks.

“Hail, subjects.”

“Hail.” Esha gave namaste, her arms
trembling with the motions. Atarangi had the gall to take up the
spade and fill in her hole before she straightened to
attention.

These three guards only looked more
intimidating as they drew close: they had Grewian features and
singed-paper brown skin. These were experienced guards marked by
years in the sun: they must have ground away their sense of mercy
for poachers.

“Hail as well,” Atarangi added, She nudged
her laddered-bead necklace, the one bearing her caste sigil. “Is
there some trouble here?”

The guards expressions shifted like water
soaking into earth. Grudging as pulled teeth, they drew their hands
together in namaste, which Atarangi returned with a leaf-edge
smile.

“This is a routine patrol, good diplomat,”
the lead guard said. “for the preservation of the Empire's order.
Your name?”

“Atarangi Te Waaka.”

Ah, she's a Manyori
ran silently
across the guard's face. “Allow me to welcome you to Rice Plateau,
madam. Couldn't keep from noticing, though, that you and your
companion are digging. What is your business?”

“I was admiring your trees,” Atarangi
replied, “and wanted to see what their roots looked like. Nothing
like this grows where I hail from.”

It was better than any excuse Esha had ever
slapped together — but still, the lead guard's eyes narrowed while
he nodded.

Fear clotted larger in Esha's gut — and as
she felt trembling under her feet, she knew why. A quake was rising
again, another one, yet again.

“Get low!” she and the lead guard cried in
broken unison. All of them spread their feet; they threw hands
against the nearest trees; they snagged their gazes of fear
together.

The earthquake went on for a dozen pounding
heartbeats, before it faded. The forest rang with its own
stillness; birds yelped in flocks overhead.

The guards returned to planted-foot soldier
stance, but their faces still read plainly human.

“Are you well, subjects?” the leader barked,
bracing against a tree to rise.

Esha nodded, her head a loose thing on her
neck.

“I believe so,” Atarangi said
breathless.

“We'll make note of your presence here on
Rice, diplomat, and leave you to your work. We must ensure that all
is well after that earthquake. Take note: Atarangi Te Waaka, a
diplomat, is passing through Rice on personal business.”

The documenting soldier hurried an inkstick
from her pocket. “Additional notes?”

“The diplomat is accompanied by— Your
nameplate, citizen?”

No prompt for a bribe, and no mere request
for Esha's name. Esha was a changing woman but still a lowly
fieldwoman
and under the guard's flinty stare, she lifted a
hand.

“Is that necessary?” Atarangi asked,
convincingly mild but she was too late: Esha was drawing her
nameplate from under her shirt.

Esha froze — and the leader furrowed brows
at her.

“Go on.”

She pulled out her nameplate with the
exquisite awareness of her mistake: she was showing the wrong
nameplate, the bright metal marked
Esha
, not
Gita
.

“Esha Of The Fields—“ the leader
confirmed.

“Sir.” The third guard turned from watching
behind them, eyes round with fear, “Smoke is visible from Durbavra
Tier.”

“Noted,” the leader snapped. “The diplomat—
Ah. She is accompanied by a fieldwoman guide. End note.” The lead
soldier fixed an appraising gaze on Atarangi, and glanced it
briefly to Esha. “A coin of advice: mind yourselves while in the
Empire's forests. As you were.”

Even after the guards vanished from sight,
walking brisk and then running toward town, Esha couldn't let her
tightness of breath go. “Gods' balls, I thought I was going to
die.”

“From the guards, or from the earthquake?”
Atarangi's face was too stark to carry the joke well; she took up
her wheeled pack strap and passed Esha hers.

“It hardly matters which.”

“Another earthquake ...” Atarangi shook her
head. “I've heard of aftershocks, but not three such commanding
quakes within a month. This can't be normal, can it?”

“No,” Esha said. “Something must be
displeased with us. All humans, I mean.”

Pressing her broad lips, Atarangi worked at
that thought.

“We should burn juniper when we can,” Esha
suggested. “It's a small gesture but well, everything is, to a holy
being.”

Atarangi looked away through the bamboo, to
the glimpses of smoke blackening the sky. “That can be part of our
next supply trip. But I don't think we'll have good fortune at the
market right now.”

“I'm not showing a nameplate on this plateau
again. Those guards know me as Esha now, it's too great a
risk.”

“Then ... There's nothing else for it: we'll
keep ascending. From here, it's around twelve kilometres to the
mountain's face?”

“Closer to fifteen,” Esha guessed. Rice was
an immense plateau in all ways. “But Rice sends a lot of its goods
upward, we shouldn't have trouble finding a spire pass once we do
get there.”

“Work under clouds and rewards will rain
upon us,” Atarangi said. “There's our itinerary for the days ahead,
then.”

Past the cedars and over gumgrass, they
found the mountain-bound dirt road and followed its guide.

They weren't walking long before an orange
wisp appeared in the high distance, sailing over Millworks
Plateau's iron-girded edge. Rooftop came to them, arrow-straight
and faster than mere travel.

“
Kin,”
he cried urgent, “
kin!”
He landed stumbling on the wheeled pack, crests flared stiff and
chest heaving.
“( ) felt ( ) earth-shaking, are you (
)?”

“We're fine,” Atarangi said in a leafy voice
— while Esha hurried to get thistle stem from the wheeled pack and
chew the green from it. “Completely unhurt. It wasn't a severe
earthquake in the place we were standing.”

“
That gives me relief. But I have The
deal has changed! My phoenix-acquaintance—“

Rooftop gestured along with the word
acquaintance,
a fluid circling of his neck; the meaning was
enormous but gone before Esha could push lungta toward it.

“—
will break the song-flower kuh-kree
before you arrive.”

“What?! No!” Without resin encasing it, the
lungta-rich orchid flower would disintegrate with the first cold
breeze — if the backstabbing wretch bird didn't eat it first. “She
can't, she hasn't let us speak!”

“No offer seemed to tempt her?” Atarangi
asked.

Crests folding, Rooftop turned his eyes to
the ground.
“I wanted to greater-try. Then came the
earth-shaking, and I was black-fearful for you ...”

Atarangi scratched his ruff feathers. “I'll
take your love over your duty, my friend.”

“
You are un-hurt, too, Precious
One?”

Esha spat a sigh as they dragged the wheeled
pack back into motion. “I'm fine, but it won't matter if I can't
get the khukuri back. Yaah, Rooftop, I'm sorry — I didn't mean it
that way.” His fallen crests made him look like a rain-drenched yak
and it dug at Esha's heart. “But ... there must be something she
wants more than my khukuri!”

A keen slipped from Rooftop, one that meant
nothing more concrete than unease. Esha and Atarangi turned,
startled, to him — and Atarangi looked distant as ice, chilled by
the thought of Rooftop withholding from her.

“Did she kin-forbid you?” Atarangi
asked.

“
Yes, yes, she did! I blue-soak with
regret, Morning Sky — she wants no one but phoenix-kin in her
territory, and no one to know her affairs.”

Her jaw setting, Atarangi faced forward.
“We'll stand at the edge of her territory, then, and do what we
can. I've convinced such mute stones to speak to me before.”

By the first stretching shadows of sunset,
they were hooking their cargo into a pulley rig and hauling it
halfway to Millworks. Esha breathed hard and she could still feel
the shape of her own cartilage past Atarangi's tsupira, but she
would claw her way up onto Millworks before she slept again. That
was a promise, to herself and to her allies.

As Esha stepped onto the first steel spire,
she noted that she hadn't seen one familiar brick wall, or rice
paddy, or leatherworker frowning downward, dismayed. Her second
time on Rice had gone as well as could be expected.

Chapter 12

Climbing spire passes did not get easier
with practice. Atarangi had a little more tsupira to give but the
herb couldn't stifle everything.

Night had thoroughly fallen by the time
Atarangi rounded Millwork Plateau. With Atarangi's hands locked
around hers, Esha pushed up the final step and staggered onto
Millwork Plateau, each pace a barbed hook through her knees. She
cried out, then bit back her voice as she sank down and sat.

“Esha?”

“I just need air.”

She hunched there, gasping, as the world
whirled before her. With each breath she tore inward, the movement
slowed. Soon, the only thing whirling was sky's lungta floating in
silvery flakes past her nose.

“Rooftop, check for guards, if you
would.”

“At this hour, won't find any at the
worldedge. They'll keep to the towns. Worst we'll run into is a
ranger.”

Atarangi hummed light. “I won't dig up any
more fineable offenses, then.”

Breathing was trouble enough; Esha didn't
need to be snickering.

This high up Tselaya, the wind nipped cold.
Pines and cedars stood only as tall as a low-caste's shack roof but
their needles looked verdant even in the moonlight, nearly luminous
with high-altitude lungta. Esha would have to consider a cup of
pine bud tea while she was near the opportunity.

She and Atarangi trudged eastward, away from
the edge's whistling air and into dappled forest shadow. Rooftop
flitted ahead, his bobbing head searching out whichever unseen
lines they had to avoid crossing.

“Ah,” Atarangi said. “There's phoenix
sign.”

Esha cast her gaze around at the
brown-needled ground, searching for phoenix shit.

“No,
above
us. That bundle — see it,
in the top of that yunan pine?”

Where Atarangi pointed, one forked branch of
the pine tree did hold a tube shape — like sticks or stems bundled
together.

“That's phoenix sign? How can you tell?”

“There's something looped around it —
yankvine, most likely.”

Esha squinted: the tail end of something
swayed in the wind. Atarangi must have had eagle's eyes to match
her beak.

“When an item is hidden up high and marked
with a knot,” Atarangi explained, “it belongs to a phoenix.
Something too large to carry around in their stringfeathers, or
simply something they've gathered for later.

“Yaah, that's something I've never seen. I'm
more often looking toward my feet, though, I suppose.”

“It's not a custom known to many humans.
Just the ones who try to listen.” Atarangi's voice was worn but
soft. “We should keep on: our dealmaker won't like us appraising
her things.”

After too much more walking through the
dark, under the glaring moon, they reached a place Rooftop's
approved of: a stand of cold-withered cedar saplings with the
ground picked clean beneath them.

“
This place is beside
phoenix-acquaintance's territory,”
Rooftop said. “She will
allow this, I think.”

“At this moment, I don't care,” Esha
grumbled, digging under fuel sticks for her blankets. “Today's been
too long.”

They made token discussion of whether to
cook dinner. As if with one mind, Esha and Atarangi produced their
remaining scraps of popped maize and leftover onion chapatti: that
would hold them until morning. They shared between each other's
hands and Rooftop's plucking beak. Then they strung their tents
from the stunted cedars and went to bed, separated by one arm's
length of rustling tarpaulin.

“
Feels strange,”
Rooftop whined from
inside Atarangi's tent.

“What does, my kin?”

He croaked a blurring range of colour words.
“Feels strange, that is all. I think I am brown-wilting
tired.”

“Be surprised if you weren't,” Esha said
into the crook of her arm.”It's been a blessed experience spending
time with you both but don't take offence: I'll be glad when we
finish dealing with the damned thief.”

“Esha ...” Atarangi hesitated, labouring to
collect a thought. “You've taken great strides in this journey. I
thank you for all that you've tried to understand, but still —
please,
please
don't call her a thief when we meet.”

“That's what she is,” Esha sighed, “but I
know. I'll hold my tongue. They're your negotiations — and heaven
knows speaking is a mathematical art. I still say that she stole
from me, though, whatever her reasons are.”

“
Our wild-acquaintance has many
reasons,”
Rooftop offered.

Bitterness rose in Esha's throat. “All
thieves have reasons.”

Rising at dawn was miserable as any
hangover, but the thought of breakfast spurred the three of them to
work. They grabbed up dry pine twigs, and dry-rotten hunks of
fallen logs, and cones long since picked clean of their seeds. The
fire cracklingly devoured all the pine resin, sending up sparks
like lungta returning to heaven.

“I never thought I'd be putting tree wood
onto a fire,” Esha said. “Smells good, though.”