Last First Snow (6 page)

She stared at her reflection in the darkened bathroom's mirror for a count of twenty, flushed the toilet, washed her hands, dried them on the towel. Mina didn't seem to notice when she returned, though she did look up when Elayne set a business card on her notepad.

Mina's eyes were large and soft over the rims of her glasses.

“In case you need anything,” Elayne said. “In case there's any way I can help.”

Mina did not quite smile. “I guess we're not very subtle in this family.”

Elayne did not smile, either. Somewhere in the last few years she'd lost the knack of doing so in a reassuring manner. Her teeth seemed to multiply, her grin too broad, as if her bones strained against her flesh: the skeleton in waiting. “I do not need to catch you eavesdropping to see that you're nervous. I would be too, if I was in your position.”

“This will get bad,” she said.

“I hope not. But if it does, there's my card. Monicola Hotel, room four-oh-four. Or visit our local office. They can find me.”

She put the card in the breast pocket of her shirt. “Thank you.”

Then she returned to her work, and Elayne to hers.

 

7

The guards cheered when Chel came to the bonfire for dinner. Forty of them sat in a clearing between the tents, and they set down their bowls to applaud: guys and gals she knew from childhood and from the docks, survivors of the picket lines and the final wicked deal last winter, all muscles, tattoos, dirt and scars and smiles. She raised her hands and sketched an actress's bow, flaring an imaginary cape. Her friends hooted and whistled. When she looked up she saw Tay at the other side of the circle. He wasn't laughing, and hadn't clapped. Well, fuck him, or not, at least for now. “Thank you,” she said in the poshest Camlaander accent she could fake, hamming it up. Cozim, by the fire, laughed so hard he almost dropped the ladle into the stewpot. Not everyone here was a dockhand: when they started standing guard others joined them. One of the new women gave Chel a high-five, then winced. Soft hands. Chel dropped back into her normal voice, into Low Quechal. “Not that I mind—but what did I do?”

Cozim passed her a bowl of stew that looked and smelled like it was mostly made from charcoal. “Heard about you and the witch this morning.”

“Knocked her right to the ground,” the new woman said. Ellen, Chel's memory supplied. Schoolteacher, one of those who came over with Red Bel from the union, which explained her soft hands.

“Choked her half to death.” That was Zip, huge and broad. Word around the docks ran that Zip once won a head-butting contest with an ox, and Chel credited the rumor. “Shoulda gone the other half.”

“Way I heard it,” Cozim said, “you saved Temoc's life.”

She stared into the stew, but it offered her no reflections. She tried a bite; something in there might charitably be described as meat. “Cozim, did Food Com send this?”

“Ain't their fault.” Cozim pointed over to Zip. “They sent meat raw for us to cook. Something to prove, I guess, after the fight this morning. Thank Zip for the texture.”

“Godsdamn, Zip. Your mother never teach you to cook?”

“'S good all black like that. Cleans the teeth.” Zip bared his own teeth, which did not help his point.

“Put those things away,” Chel said. “You want to blind us?” She tried the stew again, but a few seconds' cooling had not improved the flavor.

“Why didn't you kill her?” Ellen again—and Chel couldn't tell whether she was scared, or eager. The circle grunted interest.

“You think I could have?” Chel said. “You ever seen a Craftsman die?”

“Saw one crushed by a shipping container once,” Zip said. “Walked under the crane. Cable snapped.” Someone chuckled, and he glared around the circle, looking for the one who'd laughed. Nobody owned up. “I'd checked it. Hand to gods.”

Chel didn't argue. “Did he stay dead? They can come back, mostly.”

“Beats me.”

“Still, though,” Ellen pressed. “Why not?”

“She didn't come to hurt Temoc. She just got the wrong impression when she saw him at the altar. You've been to services.” Nods around the circle. “She jumped him because she didn't know what was happening. That was my fault. I should have told her.”

“Still,” Cozim said. “You got your hands on her throat. Counts for something.”

She'd thought so too, at first. But Elayne had healed that girl, and Temoc greeted her as a friend. “It's not like that,” she said, and again, louder, for the others to hear over their own laughter: “It's not.”

“You taking the witch's side?”

“No.” Chel stood. The others stopped talking. Forty pairs of eyes rested on her. She felt suddenly exposed. She'd spoken to rooms before—given orders, addressed crowds in the strike. This felt different. “The King in Red sent her to talk. They want to make a deal.”

“We've heard that before. Deals don't end well for us.”

“This one might. And we almost stopped her at the border because we were afraid. I jumped her because she didn't understand what she saw. Let's say they really do want to deal—and I mean like people deal with people, not like the bosses dealt with us back at the docks. Any of you want to count how many times we screwed up today? How many times we almost wrecked our chances?”

Cozim stirred the charcoal stew. “What are you saying, Chel?”

“Back on the docks, we knew our job. We've been standing guard here as if that makes us guards, but we don't know what we're doing any more than fresh muscle knows how to load a cargo ship. We almost turned back a Craftswoman who wanted to help us, and we let a poisoner in. If we screw up and a fight breaks out, who you think the papers will blame?” She let the question hang. A few tents over, someone played a slow air on a three-string fiddle.

“What should we do, then?”

“We need rules,” she said. “Just like at work. So we're ready for whatever.” She sat back down, and picked up her bowl. “What those should be, I don't know.”

“We could make a uniform,” Cozim suggested. “So they know we're all together, not just some gang. Doesn't need to be anything fussy, just a sign.”

“I got a rule I need to know,” Zip said. “When do we get to hit 'em?” Some of the boys laughed.

“When they hit us first.”

Suggestions came fast after that. Even Ellen joined in after a while. Chel listened more than she spoke, glad to have the focus off her—though once every while folks looked back to her for approval, as if she knew what from what. She added a few questions to the mix, answered others.

Tay turned from the fire and walked away. He hadn't spoken since she sat down. As Zip and Cozim argued over what color armband the guards should wear, Chel left her burnt stew to follow him.

*   *   *

She caught Tay outside the tent circle. He'd lit a cigarette, and offered her one.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” He took a long drag, and stuffed the crumpled pack into the pocket of his thick canvas pants. He wasn't a talker, never had been. He smoked a cheap Shining Empire brand he'd started with in Kho Khatang before he got kicked out of the merchant marine, more spun glass and pixie dust than tobacco inside the rolling paper. Got the packs off a sailor he still sort of knew, who'd been jumped by some homophobic son of a bitch during a night of drunken shore leave and was getting the shit kicked out of him when Tay stepped in. Son of a bitch and friends broke Tay's nose; Tay and the sailor did them worse, and Tay got canned for it. He came back to DL to work on the docks with his dad, and these days his sailor friend brought him foul cigarettes by the carton and didn't take payment in return. Chel had called bullshit on the story when Tay told her, two weeks after they first slept together, but she'd met the sailor and he still had the scars.

The faraway fiddle took up a faster tune, and drums joined in. The smell of spiced pork mixed with sweat and weed and tent canvas and rubber from the soles of many shoes. She missed the dock stink. Not enough oil and sea, here. “So you're a hero now,” he said.

“As if I know what that's supposed to mean.”

“You didn't argue when everyone clapped.”

“You're jealous.”

“I'm not,” he said. She laughed. “I'm not. But if that witch really had come to kill Temoc—”

“She was here to talk, Tay.”

“If she wasn't,” he pressed. “If she wasn't, you'd still have jumped her.”

“Yeah.”

“And how do you think that would have ended?”

“They can die,” she said, though she'd maintained the opposite to Cozim.

“If she wanted to kill you, she could have.”

She'd spent most of the afternoon trying not to think these thoughts. She knew the Craft was dangerous. God Wars vets, those still living, told stories: war machines, crawling undead and demon hordes, sigils that turned your mind inside out when you read them. And every day she saw Craftwork miracles—ships with masts tall enough to scrape the sky, metal sailless hulks larger inside than out. What could the people who made such things do when they went to war? Best not to think, because thinking terrified. “She didn't.”

He breathed smoke, tapped ash, examined the ember of his cigarette. “I don't want you to die.”

“Me neither.”

“Not for Temoc or for anyone.”

“You are jealous.”

Tay laughed hard, and put the cigarette back in his mouth.

“If the Craftswoman really wanted to deal,” she said, “it was worth the risk. And if she didn't, I had to stop her.”

“Nine hells of a risk.”

“But think of the reward.” She turned them both to face the camp beneath the golden sky. As the sun set, signs and slogans came down. Fireside circles bloomed with life. The camp by night became a village, messy and wild and new, in the middle of Dresediel Lex. “If there's a chance at a deal, we have to try. We lost the strike; we can't lose this, too. They want a Skittersill too rich for Zip to raise his kids. A Skittersill where we don't fit. I can't let that happen.”

“Me neither.” He touched her on the waist.

She took the cigarette from his mouth and kissed him, and tasted salt and tobacco and pixie dust and glass. “Come on. Let's go back. Maybe Zip's stew is an acquired taste.”

“You get my share.”

“No fair.” She jabbed her knuckles into his side. “You have to eat that shit if I do. We're in this together.”

“Yeah,” he said, that one word drawn out with a touch of pleasant surprise at the end, as if he'd found a gift inside. Together they returned to the fire.

 

8

The King in Red's secretary rose from her desk to bar Elayne's way. “If you don't have an appointment, you'll have to wait.”

“He'll make time,” Elayne said. She'd taken an hour-long carriage ride through traffic and three elevators to reach the King in Red's foyer, on the top floor of the pyramid he'd remodeled into an office building. The trip had not calmed her. The secretary was no fit target for her anger, but Elayne would not let herself be detained in Kopil's lobby, no matter how elegantly appointed it might be.

“He's secluded.” The woman pointed to the obsidian doors behind her, carved with serpents and dead gods. Closed, the doors' engravings formed an enormous skull, eye sockets aflame. “No one enters after he's lit the fires. His schedule clears tomorrow at two. I'll pencil you in, or if it's urgent we can squeeze you between his security briefing and the evening market rundowns.”

Elayne closed her eyes.

Neon spiderwebs and interlocking ghostlit gears filled the foyer around her. The door was well Crafted, but not well enough to stop Elayne. She found the timekeeping mechanism in an instant, and its bond to the schedule on the secretary's desk. Trivial to twist the schedule's sense of local time; it was always two tomorrow afternoon somewhere.

The door ground open. Grave-blackness gaped beyond.

The secretary gaped, too. “See?” Elayne said. “I told you he'd make time.”

She strode past secretary and doors into a shadow that closed about her like a mouth. Stone steps rose through the night. She could have summoned fire, but she needed none.

After a long climb she emerged into a deeper darkness in which the King in Red sat, wreathed by lightning.

He hovered cross-legged in midair, finger bones resting on the sharp protrusions of his knees. Blue-white sparks leapt from his skull to the crystal dome above. Their brief flashes illuminated the outlines of his office: altar-desk, stuffed bookcases, umbrella stand. Somewhere, a Zurish contrabass choir chanted songs of praise and terror.

“What exactly,” she said, “were you trying to pull?”

The choir faltered and failed. Crimson stars caught fire in the King in Red's eye sockets. “I see you visited our friends in Chakal Square.”

“I did. Especially our mutual friends.”

The skeleton sighed, and stood. Robes fell heavy around him. Toe bones tapped the floor. The lightning faded, and normal ghostlight returned to the room: a sparsely furnished crystal dome atop the eighty-story pyramid of 667 Sansilva, from which Red King Consolidated distributed water to the fourteen million people of Dresediel Lex. A long time ago, priest-kings had sacrificed people on the red-tinged altar that now served Kopil for a desk. “I didn't think Temoc's involvement was worth mentioning.”

“Wrong. You thought it was worth not mentioning.” A carafe of coffee rested on a side table near the desk. Elayne poured herself a cup with the Craft, and floated it through the air to her waiting hand. “You knew about the Alt Selene ruling. You're not that far out of touch. You thought Chakal Square might be a problem. You investigated, and learned Temoc was involved.” She drank the coffee. “This is good.”