Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

Wry-abed : (Hara) the politest colloquial term for men who prefer to have sex with men and women who prefer to have sex with women.

The cellar room was cool, pleasantly dim, the pinlights arranged across the ceiling in patterns to mimic the stars. It wasn’t much of an illusion—the heavy beams that supported the dance floor broke the pattern, distorted it into odd geometry—but the steady pounding of drums and feet made the lights tremble like stars seen through atmosphere. Warreven grinned at the thought and earned a glare from Haliday, sitting across from him in the other corner of the private cubby.

“Relax, Hal,” Malemayn said, and reached for the jug of nightwake that stood in the center of the table. He refilled the five cups, leaving the sixth still empty, and looked at Warreven.

Before he could say anything, however, the off-world woman at his left said, “Damn Shan Reiss anyway. There isn’t time for this.”

The man beside her growled agreement, and then looked embarrassed, picked up his cup and drank to hide his uncertainty. Warreven watched him, still not certain what to make of him. Destany Casnot seemed very ordinary to be the cause of all this trouble, a big, light-skinned herm, who had once been flashily handsome but had settled into the thick-bodied Casnot middle age. It was hard to imagine that he had done trade; harder still to imagine what ’Aukai saw in him that made her want to bring him with her into her exile. Warreven glanced at his hands, folded on the tabletop, in the overlapping circles of light, seeing dirt under the broken fingernails. Reiss had said that Destany had a mairaiche , a truck garden, of his own in the scrub outside the city, between the Bounder Road and the hills; why anyone would give that up, the rare security of cultivation, was more than Warreven could understand. And to give it up for Timban ’Aukai—

“We know,” Haliday said, and managed to sound almost convincingly soothing. “He’ll be here.” Ȝe looked at Warreven then, too, and he sighed.

“I talked to him this afternoon. He said he’d come.” After I invoked his clan, our shared Watch, and a few summers screwing around with him in Irenfot , he added silently, but he did say he’d meet with us . Haliday was looking at him as though 3e’d read his thoughts, and Warreven looked hastily at the time display over the street-side door. “It’s only just time.”

Haliday made a face, and the woman said again, “I don’t have time for this.”

Warreven glanced at her. The years had not been particularly kind to Timban ’Aukai, and she had not been beautiful to start with, a rangy, raw-boned woman who wore exaggeratedly tight-waisted clothes to keep from being mistaken for a mem. She was still wearing the clothes, a wide belt cinched painfully tight over a flowing shirt that seemed meant to add bulk at the hips, but her once-fine skin had been coarsened by the Haran sun, and there was a scar along her jaw where a sun-tumor had been removed. ’Aukai looked back at him, her pale eyes—an odd, off-world color, gray like winter clouds—flicking up and down in automatic assessment. It was an expression Warreven remembered all too well—he was probably meant to remember, he told himself, and met her stare without flinching.

The music, drums and whistle, was suddenly louder, and Warreven twisted in his chair to see Reiss coming down the stairs from the dance house overhead. One of the servers intercepted him, saying something in a voice too low to be heard over the drumming, but Reiss shook his head, gesturing to the table. Malemayn lifted a hand, and the off-worlder came to join them, dropping into the remaining chair.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said cheerfully. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long.” He poured himself a glass of nightwake without waiting for an invitation and smiled guilelessly around the table, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes. Haliday’s frown deepened, and Malemayn laid a hand on 3er elbow, signaling silence.

Destany said, “You know the situation, Reiss. How can you back out now?” On me, your clan-cousin—your adopted clan, that took you in : he didn’t have to say any of that, and even in the dim light, Warreven could see the color rising in Reiss’s cheeks.

“I don’t have a choice,” Reiss said, still in that too-bright tone that masked embarrassment, and Warreven leaned forward before anyone else could speak.

“’Aukai’s right, we don’t have time for this. Tell them what you told me, Reiss.”

Reiss glanced at him, the blue eyes, foreign eyes, like ’Aukai’s conspicuous even in the relatively low light. When he spoke, the false brightness had utterly vanished. “I don’t have a choice, not if I want to keep my job. IDCA came down hard on my boss, and he told me flat out, withdraw the statement, or I don’t work for him anymore. I’m sorry, Destany—” For the first time, he looked at him directly, Casnot to Casnot. “—but I’m not risking my residency.”

“You were born here,” Destany said.

“I was born in Irenfot,” Reiss said. “You know that. No offense, Stany, but I don’t want to go back there. If I lose my job, that’s the only place I’ve got legitimate rights.”

“They can’t hold you to that,” Haliday began, and Reiss laughed.

“Can’t they? I’ll have pissed off IDCA, and they have final say here.”

“Or if they do,” Haliday said, with dignity, as though 3e hadn’t been interrupted, “you can fight it.”

Reiss shook his head again. “They’re making this into a question of trade. I can’t fight that—I’ve played around too much, they make an issue of it, they can get me for that. I’m sorry.”

“Why in all hells are they so concerned about trade now?” Malemayn said, then made a face and answered his own question. “Because it’s us, and everybody knows we’re looking for a case to challenge the trade system.”

“This wasn’t it,” Haliday muttered. Ȝe sighed, and looked at ’Aukai. “Maybe you’d—Destany’d—be better off with another set of advocates.”

“Do you think it would help?” ’Aukai asked, and Malemayn shook his head.

“Probably not, unless you can get another off-worlder to swear for you. Or if Reiss changes his mind.”

“Reiss is kin,” Destany said flatly. “I don’t know off-worlders anymore.”

“All I ever wanted was for Stany to be with me,” ’Aukai said quietly. “Either for me to stay, or him to come with me. You wouldn’t think it’d be that complicated.”

Well, yes, I would , Warreven thought. You’ve run trade out of your shop for close to a local decade, you can’t expect IDCA to do you any favors now . He said nothing, however, leaning back in his chair as Malemayn turned to Reiss.

“Do you think it would make a difference to your boss, to IDCA, if we weren’t involved?”

Reiss shrugged. “I have no idea. Look, I don’t know what’s really going on, any more than you do.”

“If it did, would you make your statement again?” Malemayn asked.

“Absolutely,” Reiss said, and glanced at Destany. “I don’t want to back out on you, on my obligations. I know what I owe Casnot, it’s just—I don’t have any choice.”

“We could ask Langbarn to take over,” Malemayn said, and Haliday snorted.

“He’s—ρe’s still a mem, no matter what ρe calls himself. The courts won’t like it.”

Warreven looked at ’Aukai, shutting out the conversation. It didn’t really matter, not unless they could find some way to persuade Reiss’s boss—Mhyre Tatian, he reminded himself, with an odd thrill that he wouldn’t admit was pleasure—to let Reiss make his statement. Beyond ’Aukai, a frieze of the spirits danced along the wall, Captain and Madansa and Agede the Doorkeeper with his eyepatch and bottle of sweetrum; the painted Captain, broad-shouldered, broad-bearded, reminded him of the feel of Tatian’s body against his own as they stood for an instant in unintended embrace. He dismissed that thought before it was fully formed: that was not the way to persuade a man who opposed trade so vehemently.