Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (30 page)

"Of course," Walegrin replied without hesitation as he, rather than Enoir, held the door open.

He called for Zip as soon as the door had shut behind them. "That is your escort?" Masha sneered, the edge in her voice trying to cover her discomfort and fear.

"No, that's our guide; I'm the escort. Let's get moving." Whatever Masha zil Ineel was doing now that she had money, she hadn't let it soften her. She let the shawl drape loosely from her shoulders and kept pace with them along the Path of Money. The heavy chest seemed not to slow her at all and she refused to let either man carry it. The moon set; Walegrin bought a brace of torches from the Processional night-crier and they continued along their way, avoiding the Maze though all of them knew the secrets of its dark passages. They came into the Shambles and halted.

A knot of torch fires was headed toward them, bobbing, even falling, as their bearers shouted into the still, hot air. It reminded the three native Sanctuarites of the riotous plague marches that told the city's better-off citizens when death had erupted in the slums. Silently Zip melted back into the shadows, pushing Masha and her white shawl behind him. Walegrin slipped the straps off his green-steel sword and shoved the stump of his own torch into a gap in the nearest wall.

A gang of newcomer workmen emerged from the darkness. They staggered and stumbled into each other and their shouting proved to be the once-tender chorus of a love ballad. Walegrin shrugged a good deal of the tension from his shoulders but held his ground as they took note of him and lurched to a halt.

"A whorehouse, off-sher, where the wimmen're pretty?" their ersatz leader requested, drawing the outline of what he considered an extremely attractive woman in the air between them. His cohorts broke off their singing to whistle and laugh their agreement.

Walegrin rubbed the loose hair from his forehead and tucked it under his bronze circlet. If he waited a few more moments at least two of the newcomers were going to pass out in the dust and their whole expedition would come to naught. But the men who worked on the walls were being paid daily in good Rankan coinage and the Street of Red Lanterns was suffering from the weather. He did his civic duty and pointed them out of the Shambles toward the Gate of Triumph where, if they did not fall afoul of Ischade, they would eventually find the great houses. Zip was at his side before he had the torch pulled from the wall.

"Forking, loud fools," he snarled.

"Maybe we should give up our respective trades and build walls or unload barges for a living," Walegrin mused.

"Listen to them. They must be halfway into the square and you can still hear them! They'll get eaten alive."

The garrison commander raised one eyebrow. "Not while they're traveling in packs like that," he challenged. "You backed off quick enough." And Zip stood silent. There were big men in Sanctuary. Tempus was about the biggest; Walegrin and his brother-in-law, Dubro, weren't exactly small-boned either. But, save for the Stepsons, the newcomers were the biggest, best-fed men Sanctuary had seen in a generation or more. Even if they were only common laborers, another man-a native man like Zip -would have to think seriously before bothering them.

"They're ruining the town," the PFLS leader said finally.

"Because they work for their bread? Because they pay fairly for what they need and save to bring their families here to live with them?" Masha interjected. "I thought you were bringing me down here to see a woman." With a half-glance back toward the square, where the newcomers were still singing. Zip grabbed the torch from Wale-grin's hands and plunged into the Shambles backways.

The safe-house was ominously quiet as Zip doused the torch and led the way to the deeply shadowed stairway. He stopped short in the doorway to the upper room; Walegrin bumped into him. The girl was still lying in the comer silent and motionless. Her young lover squatted beside her, his face shiny with unmanly tears. The garrison commander scarcely noticed as Masha shoved him aside. Her movements did not interrupt the invective he privately directed to such gods and goddesses as should have taken a care in these matters. Like many fighting men, Walegrin could understand the sudden death that came on the edge of a weapon but he had no tolerance for the simpler sorts of dying that claimed ordinary mortals.

He watched, and was faintly curious, as Masha took a glass hom from her kit and, with the solid stem of it to her ear and its open bell against the girl's skin, performed a swift, but precise, examination.

"Get the torch over here!" she commanded. "She's still breathing; there's hope, at least, for the babe."

None of the men responded. She stood up and grabbed the nearest, the young man who had been crying.

"There's hope for your child, you fool!" She shook his tunic as she spoke and a glimmer of life returned to his eyes. "Find a basin. Make a fire and boil me some water."

"I... we have nothing but this." The young man gestured at the crudely furnished room.

"Well, find a basin... and clean rags while you're about it." The young man looked at Zip, who stared blankly back at him.

"Your fish-eye, Muznut-next door," Walegrin suggested. "He'll have all that, won't he? Even the rags, I imagine."

Zip's face twisted unpleasantly for a moment, then, with a sigh, he turned back to the stairway, and the warehouse. The other men followed. Masha hung her delicate shawl over a huge splinter in one of the wall beams and began unlacing her gown. There was messy work to be done and no sense to ruining her own clothing as well. She tore off the bottom panel of her shift and used one strip to bind her already dripping hair away from her face. With the rest she mopped up as much of the blood as she could and plotted the tasks before her.

They built a fire in the courtyard using some of Muznut's fine charcoal and such bumable rubble as was scattered about. The flames turned the ruined gardens into an inferno but the men stayed close by the fire, returning to the upper room only when Masha demanded fresh water or cloths. They said nothing to each other, choosing positions within the courtyard that allowed a clear view of the midwife's flickering shadow and yet shielded them from each other's casual glance.

Toward dawn the bats returned to their normally deserted lairs, their shrill peeps echoing off the walls and the men themselves as they protested the occupation of their homes. The day-birds took flight as well and the small square of sky above them turned a dirty gray that betokened another round of oppressive heat. Walegrin wanted a beaker of ale and the limited comfort of his officer's quarters in the palace wall, but he remained, rubbing his eyes and waiting until Masha was through.

"Arbold!" she called from the window.

The young man looked up. "Water?" he asked, giving the neglected fire a prod.

"No, just you."

He headed into the house. Walegrin and Zip exchanged glances before following him. Masha had expected them and was at the doorway to block their entrance.

"They've only got a few moments," she said softly. The midwife had washed the new mother's face, smoothed her hair, and surrounded her with the last of Muznut's fine-woven fuse-cloth. Her eyes were bright and she was smiling at both her swaddled child and her lover. But her lips were ashen and her skin had a milky translucence in the dawn light. The men in the doorway knew Masha was right.

"The baby?" Zip whispered.

"A girl child," Masha replied. "Her leg is twisted now, but that may come right with time."

"If she has-" Walegrin began.

A final spasm racked the girl's body. A red stain spread swiftly across the cloth as she closed her eyes and gasped one more time. The child she had cradled with her waning strength slipped through her limp arms toward the floor; Arbold was too stunned to catch it.

"It killed her," he explained, his hands balled into fists at his sides, when Masha tried to place the infant in his arms. "It froggin' killed her!" His voice ascended to screaming rage.

The infant, which had been sleeping, awoke with the short-breathed cries peculiar to the just-bom. Masha held her protectively against her own breast as the young man's rant-ings showed no sign of abating.

"Killed her!" she shouted back. "How should an innocent child be held accountable for the chances of its birth? Let the blame, if there is any, fall on those fit to carry it. On those who left her mother here without care for three endless days. On the one who fathered her in the first place!" But Arbold was in no mood to consider his own part in his lover's death. His rage shifted from the infant to Masha and Zip moved swiftly across the room to restrain his comrade.

"Is there one you trust to care for this child?" Masha asked Zip. "A mother? A sister, perhaps?"

For a heartbeat it seemed there might be two irrational men in the cramped, death-ridden room, then Zip emitted a short, bitter laugh. "No," he answered simply. "She was the last. No one's left."

Masha continued to hold the infant tightly, rocking from side to side across her hips like an animal searching for a bolthole. "What then?" she whispered, mostly to herself. "She needs a home. A wetnurse-"

Walegrin chose that moment to step between them. He looked down at the infant. Its hands were red and impossibly small-scarcely able to circle his forefinger; its face was dark-mottled as if it had taken a beating just in entering this life-which it probably had.

"I'll take her with me," Masha concluded, daring Zip or Arbold to challenge her.

"No," Walegrin said-and they all stared at him in surprise.

"Is the garrison commandeering babes-in-arms now?" Zip sneered. The blond man shrugged. "Her mother's dead; her father refuses to acknowledge her: That makes her a ward of the state-unless you're thinking of raising her yourself."

Zip looked away.

"Now, Mistress zil-Ineel's an upstanding woman-but she's raised her own children and's not eager to raise another."

His ice-green eyes bore down on the midwife until she, too, looked away.

"I know a woman whose children have been taken from her. You know her too. Zip know her very well."

"Gods. No." Zip inhaled the words so they were barely audible.

"You'd gainsay me?" Walegrin's voice was as cold as his eyes.

"What? Who?" Arbold interrupted.

"The S'danzo. The one in the alley. You remember: the pillar of fire and the riots afterward?" Zip replied quickly, never taking his eyes away from Walegrin, whose hand rested on the exposed hilt of the only sword in the room.

"What would a S'danzo want-" the young man began.

"You'd gainsay me. Zip, now or ever?" Walegrin repeated. The PFLS leader shook his head and extended an arm across Arbold's chest, pre empting any untoward response from that comer.

"Say goodbye to your daughter, pud," Walegrin commanded, lifting his hand from the sword-hilt and fumbling through his belt pouch instead. "This is for you," he dropped a silver coin in Masha's hand, "for the birth of a healthy child. And this is for her," he gestured to the dead woman before dropping similar coins in Zip's palm, "to buy a shroud and see her properly buried beyond the walls." His hands were empty now; he reached out for the infant. Masha had already assessed his determination and placed the squirming bundle gently in the crook of his off-weapon arm.

"Shipri bless you," she whispered, pressing her thumb against the child's forehead so it left a white mark when she lifted it, then she spun her shawl off the splinter and tucked her leather chest under one arm. "I'm ready," she told Walegrin.

They left before the two piffles could say another word. Walegrin was more nervous about dropping the child than about having Zip at his back. He could feel it struggling against the bands of cloth and the awkwardness with which he held it. Once they had clambered through the courtyard and warehouse to the Wideway, he offered to swap burdens with the midwife.

"Never held a hungry newbom before?" Masha guessed as she settled the infant under her breast. Her companion grunted a noncommital reply. "I certainly hope you know what you're doing. Not every man's mistress is eager to take a foundling."

Walegrin adjusted the sweaty hair under his circlet and glanced at the rising sun. "We're taking the child to my half-sister in the Bazaar. Illyra the seeress-her own child was slain and she took Zip's ax in her belly in the fire riots last winter. And I have no idea if she'll want to keep it at all."

"You are a bold one," she aveired, shaking her head in amazement. The heat was affecting the Bazaar as it affected the rest of the city. Most of the daily stalls were shuttered or deserted and the vendors who made their homes in the dust-choked plaza were standing idly by their wares, making little effort to confront potential customers. Lassitude had even touched Illyra's husband, Dubro. The forge was still banked although the sun was well above the harbor wall.

The smith saw them coming, took another bite of cheese, then came forward to meet them. The months since Illyra's injury had seen a mellowing of the uneasy relationship between the two men. Dubro, who blamed his half-brother-in-law not only for the absence of his son but for all the flaws of the Rankan Empire, had been forced to admit that Walegrin had done all any man could do to save his wife and daughter. He missed his son, mourned his daughter, but knew that he cherished Illyra above all else. He greeted Walegrin and Masha with a puzzled smile.

"Is Illyra about?" Walegrin asked.

"Abed, still. She sleeps poorly in this heat."

"Will she see us?"

Dubro shrugged and ducked under the lintel of his home. Illyra emerged moments later, squinting against the sun and looking nearly twice her natural age.