Last First Snow (9 page)

“We can replace outdated divine insurance and disaster protection schema with privately maintained modern systems. The immediate advantages of disaster protection could be realized with minimal risk: four nines probability of implementation without rupture.”

“Still high,” Elayne said.

“Much lower than any proposal that includes liberalizing the Skittersill property market.”

“Okay,” Elayne said. “At least we can privatize the insurance setup.”

Batac shook his head. “My people need a liberalized market to develop the Skittersill. Without that, privatizing the insurance market only makes the land more expensive to administer.”

“Safety does offer some return on investment.”

“We have figures here—” said Kopil's statistician.

“I've seen the figures. If I go to my board with this, they'll laugh me out of the room.” He mopped his forehead with a folded handkerchief. “I'd love nothing better than to run a priesthood, dispensing grace for free. But I'm a businessman.”

Kopil: “No one here is arguing—”

“It's not enough.” Tan Batac stopped, then, and noticed the silence. The statistician stared at him with ill-disguised horror. The snakeling's forked tongue flitted. The King in Red cocked his head to one side. If he still had eyebrows, one of them would have crept upward. Stars bled out in his eyes.

Elayne wondered how many years had passed since someone last interrupted the King in Red.

Her watch chimed. She pulled it out, glanced at the face, affected surprise. “And that's break.” She stood. No one else moved. “I for one could use a stroll. Mr. Batac, come with me.”

It was not a question, and before he could say no, she opened the door and waved him out. As the door closed Elayne thought she heard a mountain laugh.

She led Batac to an empty conference room, closed the door behind him with the Craft, and blacked the glass walls.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. I get it.”

“I am not certain you do. Kopil, I understand. This case dredges up bad history for him. You don't have that excuse.”

“He has nothing to lose but his pride.” Batac glanced over his shoulder, though the room was empty. “I know how this looks, and I hate it. I grew up in the Skittersill. My family, we're better off than most who started there, but … the place is a wreck. Rents are cheap, there's crime. Stonewood refugees clog the streets. These fixes will help. Took me years to get enough people with use rights on my side to even start these talks. But not everyone on my board is there for charity. We have speculators. Real estate cartels. Construction folks. They want profits, and I don't mean oracles. Some took big loans from ugly banks to buy up use rights to Skittersill land so this deal could happen. If I go back to them—” He pointed to the door. His hand trembled. “If I go back to them and say we got some stuff we wanted but not enough to make this worth their while, they cut and run. My position collapses. All this goes for nothing. You get paid for your time even if these negotiations fall to shit. His Majesty back there, he owns the damn water. What's he have on the line?”

He was breathing heavy by his tirade's end, and looked raw as a tree in winter. A northern winter, she amended. Trees in Dresediel Lex never shed their leaves.

“You are afraid.”

“Afraid?” His laugh sounded strained. “I have responsibilities.”

“Your best alternative to an agreement is quite bad.”

“Yes.”

“You can blame this on the protesters. Or the King in Red. You can blame it on the judge, or me, or yourself if you like, but no amount of blame will change the situation. You need a liberalized property market. Very well. Then your best move is to devote yourself to the process. Work with the people of Chakal Square. Decide what your board can offer, because you get what you want through this process or not at all.”

“What happened to, if they're unreasonable we don't have to deal with them?”

“They're reasonable,” Elayne said. “If they break down at the table, we have options—but that's no more a plan than entering a boxing ring with the hope your opponent will tie his own shoelaces together before you touch gloves. Are we done?”

He nodded. “You set that alarm.”

“It was that, or drag you from the room on even less pretext.”

“You're a clever woman, Elayne.”

“Base tricks hardly qualify as clever,” she said. “And I try not to make a habit of theatrics. But sometimes ends justify unpleasant means.”

She released the Craft that blacked out the walls and windows. Sunlight returned, and Dresediel Lex beyond and below the skyspire.

“Okay,” he said, and again: “Okay. Let's get to work.”

 

12

Energy and mass bend time and space—so the Hidden Schools taught. No wonder, then, the meeting seemed to last forever. Tan Batac played fair, but the issues were tangled and the minutiae obstinately minute. Elayne chipped at both parties' resolve until, long past sunset, they teetered on the brink of agreement. Tan Batac was hoarse, and the plate of pastries picked clean. The conference room smelled of aftershave and overactive antiperspirant.

Nevertheless, Elayne was almost surprised when the door opened to admit her assistant, June. She'd forgotten it could do anything but separate her from freedom. June waited through the King in Red's rant about ownership structures; when the skeleton finished, Elayne called fifteen minutes' break, and tried not to betray relief as she left.

She closed the conference room door as if sealing all the world's evil behind it, and stalked down the hall with June in pursuit.

“Good meeting, ma'am?”

“I haven't killed anyone yet. That counts for something.”

“The abattoir's there if you need it.”

“I wish.” She stopped by a window that looked out over the Drakspine ridge. “We'll be fine.”

“Of course, ma'am.”

“What do you want? Or did you just come to rescue me?”

“You have a visitor downstairs. A Ms. Paxil,” with an accent on the first syllable, the clan name, rather than the parental name. June had lived in Dresediel Lex for ten years, but in some ways she remained very much a foreigner.

Lights glimmered from the hillside palaces. Batac probably owned a villa up there. “I don't know anyone by that name.”

“Security's on site—Ms. Paxil doesn't have an appointment, and she isn't dressed for business. But she had your name, so I thought I might check.”

“She just showed up and asked for me?”

“She claims a ‘Temoc' sent her. I can have security point her to the door.”

With knives. No, not quite. Demons didn't need knives. “I'll be right down.”

Elayne descended the rainbow bridge from the skyspire to the pyramid below, which held the earthbound offices of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao. Few Craftsmen worked down here, so far from the starlight that was their sustenance, but since real estate was cheaper on solid ground, they relegated back-office tasks to the pyramid. Compared to the spire this place wasn't much to look at, but the reception hall offered some majesty at least: backless couches and low glass tables and abstract paintings hung from walls not quite the color of cured human skin.

Chel sat on a couch, reading
The Thaumaturgist.
Demons stood around her, faint shapes shimmering in air. Mandible scraped against glassy mandible. Scythe-talons kneaded space as if the emptiness had texture, which perhaps it did, to them. Or else they were simply keeping limber, awaiting an opportunity to deploy their murderous talents.

Not that Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao was in the habit of killing people who stopped in without an appointment. Suggestions to that effect had been raised at board meetings, but Elayne was relatively sure Belladonna Albrecht meant them in jest.

“Ms. Paxil, I presume.”

Chel closed the magazine and stood. She made a good show of ignoring the demons. “Elayne. Ms. Kevarian, I mean. Good to see you.”

“You're a long way from Chakal Square.”

A demon hissed. Chel steeled her expression. “Looks like it's my turn to meet your guards.”

“Payback's fair play. At least no one has tackled you yet.”

“Good thing, too. These guys are spinier than I am.”

“How's the camp?”

“Growing. Hundreds more have come. They heard the King in Red might deal, and everybody wants to back a winner. By noon we had to push our line out. And the Wardens retreated across the street. Simple.”

“Not so simple.” She turned to the demons. “Leave us.” Light rolled through them as they flowed back into the not-quite-skin-tone walls, leaving only echoes of their footsteps. Clawsteps, maybe. “Did Temoc send you?”

“We're ready to meet your people, if they come to us.” She glanced toward the wall into which the demons had vanished. “They don't trust your turf. And he says to hurry. He's not sure how long his support will last.”

She thought of the perpetual motion argument in the conference room overhead. “Not a problem.” She hoped. “I will visit the camp tomorrow to prepare ground. We'll meet the day after.”

“Thanks.”

Chel's hand was warm. “You're welcome.” Elayne did not let go. “How is it down there?”

“Fine,” she said. “Tense.”

“Good.” With a flick of Craft, she activated a summoning circle. “A cab will be waiting downstairs to take you back. Or anywhere else you might want to go. On me.”

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled before she left. Something about her gait struck Elayne as odd. As Chel neared the door, Elayne realized she'd subconsciously expected the woman to be carrying a briefcase, or at least a purse. In her rumpled shirt and torn slacks and ragged boots, Chel bore only her pride.

Elayne climbed the rainbow bridge again, somber now, and returned to the conference room. Heads swung round, chairs spun to face her, coffee cups stopped halfway to open mouths. “Gentlemen,” she said. “The camp is ready. We are on the clock.”

 

13

The next morning, Warden barricades stopped Elayne's cab two blocks from Chakal Square. She walked the rest of the way, past jowly counterprotesters and buzzard-eyed journalists, past the Wardens' command tent and a table set with pastries and coffee for officers on duty.

Sentries surrounded the Chakal Square camp—all, this time, at an approximation of attention. Each guard wore a red armband, which Elayne did not like. Nor did she like that they remembered her.

She appreciated the escort they offered, though. The camp had grown. Faerie circles of sleeping bags, groves of protest signs and skeleton effigies, marker-scrawled icons of dead Quechal gods—before, all these seemed scattered from a height onto a game board, but as the square filled they'd assumed an organic order. She followed game trails through organizational microclimates toward the fountain. Someone had painted a face on its faceless god.

Temoc met her in a clearing. “You've grown popular,” she said.

“Not me. Many have come to support us. Chel”—who waited behind Temoc, with five men in red armbands—“helped organize the guard.”

“You didn't stop her?”

“Why would I?”

“She's given these people an identity to set against the Wardens. You know as well as anyone how dangerous that is.”

“I can't be everywhere.” He illustrated the clearing with a sweep of his hand. “Does this place suffice?”

“We need a tent.”

“My people won't like that. They want our talks transparent.”

“My clients put themselves at risk to come here. They want to deal, not play for the cheap seats. The negotiations should be private, and insulated.”

“We'll bring a tent.”

“Good enough. And I'll guard this clearing against undue influence.”

“What do you mean, influence?”

She raised one hand, and sparks flickered between her fingers.

“Oh,” he said.

“It goes both ways, of course. Kopil is robed in fear as well as crimson, but your people have their own power. Their faith has bent the local noosphere to draw more faith to feed itself. Combined, there's too much interference for a reasoned debate. Not to mention our hidden players.”

“What do you mean?”

“We still don't know who publishes the broadsheets, or what that person's goals might be. Better protect ourselves now than wish we had later.”

Watchers surrounded the clearing, peering through holes in fabric and around the curved walls of tents. “Your enchantment could twist our wills,” Temoc said. “Why should I trust you?”

“A Craftswoman's word is her power. I promise to protect both sides equally.”

“Such specificity,” he said, and smiled: a flaw in the cliff face. “Do it, then.”

She touched the glyph above her heart, and drew her work knife. The starfire blade glistened. Darkness spread from her. Glyphs flared at her temples and wrists, and she saw herself transform in Temoc's eyes from a friend to a being of light and terror. That hurt, though she was used to this particular pain. Their onlookers drew back, as expected. The world of hearts that beat and love that never died fell silent. Only whispers and wind remained.

There were many ways to prepare for a meeting. This was one.

*   *   *

She carved a circle into the flagstones, sixty feet across with a few inches' gap in its circumference. Outline established, she inscribed the ward's terms in unborn script. The space within the broken circle calmed and stabilized. Eyes closed, Elayne watched the green tide of the crowd's faith part around the perimeter she'd drawn.

Dresediel Lex's discontented watched her work. Many of these men and women had never seen real Craft. They knew its artifacts and echoes: crystal-shard skyspires overhead, driverless carriages, airbuses, optera, trapped demons, doctors who dipped their hands through patients' skin, and for every such sign a thousand smaller and subtler. The Craft told merchants how to stock their shelves, and by its power water coursed through the city's sunken pipes. These people lived in a Crafted land, but today, for the first time, they watched a Craftswoman work her will.