Melissa Scott - Shadow Man

“You should have done,” Aldess said. “We would have been glad to see you, and I know Tendlathe would like to congratulate you on becoming seraaliste . You must be very proud.”

“I’m—enjoying the work,” Warreven said, with perfect truth. He didn’t trust Aldess, anymore than he trusted any Stane, and he was doubly wary when she was sent to meet him, doing what was properly a servant’s job. Temelathe wanted something badly, to offer such an acknowledgment of status.

Aldess smiled, showing perfect teeth. Once, Warreven remembered, the front teeth had had a fractional gap between them; it had vanished within a year of her marriage. She tapped gently on the door of Temelathe’s study, pushed it open without waiting for a response. “Warreven, father,” she said, and Warreven walked past her into the little room.

Temelathe was sitting in his chair beside the stove, feet resting on a low stool of carved ironwood. The designs were worn away in places, the rounded shapes blurred, and Warreven wondered just how old the piece was. Ironwood was almost as hard as its namesake; it would have taken generations of use to blunt its glossy finish. The air smelled of donnetoil , and looking closer, he could see the rough-cast bowl resting in the chamber of the stove, piled embers showing gray and orange. There was a wheel of milkcheese on the table, the hard brick-brown sailors’ version, and a basket of flat sailors’ bread, too: all the trappings of a casual visit, Warreven thought, but none of the reality.

“My father,” he said, and knew he sounded as wary as he felt.

Temelathe waved toward the guest’s chair. “Sit. No, wait, throw some more donnetoil on the fire. This is almost gone.”

The basket was sitting on top of the stove. Warreven filled the shallow scoop with the coarse, red-black grains—they were about the size of sea salt, the freshly dried kind that the old people preferred, before the mills had crushed it—then opened the stove door and sprinkled them cautiously over the embers. The first few flashed like lightning as they hit the coals, and then the rest stabilized, sending a fresh cloud of smoke into the room. Warreven inhaled its fragrance—sharp and almost oily, the various seeds and leaves that went into the compound blending into a bitter, complicated smoke, dominated by the chimetree resin—and turned back to the guest chair without taking any more. Temelathe watched him morosely, and Warreven could see that the smoke subtly reddened his eyes. How long have you been sitting here, my father, with only the stove for company? he wondered, but that was not the sort of question one could ask Temelathe. He said, “You asked to see me, and I’m here.”

Temelathe nodded. “Which is something, I suppose. You’re making my life very difficult, my son, I hope you know that.”

Warreven said nothing. This was not what he’d expected when he’d received this summons, and he didn’t know how to handle Temelathe in this mood.

“You’re very good,” Temelathe said, after a moment. “I’m almost sorry I ever encouraged you to take up the law.”

He had used the Creole term, not the traditional word that meant both Haran statute law and the web of custom that gave it context. Warreven said, “Yes, I’m good at it. I warned you, my father.”

Tatian grunted something, said, more clearly, “I could make life extremely difficult for NAPD. They’ll have other contracts, you know, and not just with Stiller.”

“We’ve—discussed—this before,” Warreven said. Though not so openly—what in all hells is he up to? “The Big Six make all their contracts this way, favors done here and there, and they wouldn’t thank you for throwing their usual methods into question.”

“So you bring the whole question of trade into the courts,” Temelathe said, “and you and your partners can posture to your hearts’ content, and all the while we—my people, your people, the odd-bodied are my responsibility, too—lose their one decent source of income.”

“Decent?” Warreven laughed.

“Are you ashamed of what you did, my son?” Temelathe asked.

His voice was deceptively mild, and he was not, Warreven thought, as drunk as he’d appeared. “No,” he said, “of course not.”

Temelathe tilted his head in unspoken question, and Warreven shook his head, managed a smile that was genuinely amused. “No, you won’t bait me, my father. I didn’t particularly enjoy it—I wasn’t even particularly good at it—but, no, I’m not ashamed.”

“Then why do you want to close down the trade? It’s a safe space—this is a delicate balance, my son, the Six and I and IDCA and the Watch Council and now Tendlathe and his people. If trade ends, your kind will have no place left to go, and if you and Haliday keep pushing, I’m going to have to give you an answer, and there aren’t any good ones. If I say yes, we’ll follow the Concord, follow their laws, then IDCA will step in to regulate prostitution, and people like you, my son, will be whores all their lives. The mesnie s will drop you from the rolls, the clans will pretend you don’t exist, and you certainly would be neither seraaliste nor advocate. If I say no, we stand by our laws and custom, then Tendlathe wins. I have to close the dance houses and the wrangwys bars and he and his have an excuse to go hunting you out. If I ignore the whole issue—if you and Haliday and the rest of you let me ignore it—then you all stay safe.”

Warreven stared at him, knowing that everything he said was true, and not nearly enough of the truth. “The fact is, the odd-bodied exist. Sooner or later, my father, we—you, the Watch Council, the mesnie s, even Tendlathe—are going to have to admit it. Better now, when you’re running things, than when Ten takes over. We need names of our own.”

“If you meant that, my son,” Temelathe said, “you’d call yourself a herm, 3e, 3im—like Haliday.”

That stung, especially since Tatian had said very nearly the same thing. Warreven said, “I call myself a man because you only allow two choices, and this was the closest fit. I call myself a man because I’m better at that than at being a woman—and certainly better at that than being Ten’s wife.” He stopped abruptly, tipped his head to one side in sudden question. “I’ve played by your rules, my father. I made my choice, I lived with it, but it won’t ever be good enough, will it? I’m only a man as long as it’s convenient for you.”

Temelathe smiled, but said nothing.

“And if the bars are safe,” Warreven went on, “how did Lammasin die, my father?” He touched the mark on his forehead. “I came from his memore .”

Temelathe’s smile vanished. “That was none of my doing, Warreven, I give you my word on that.” Warreven said nothing, and the older man sighed. “The trouble with you, my son, is that you’ve always been able to figure out just about anything, but you’ve never had a grain of common sense with it. I’ve no use for those people myself. I wanted Lammasin out of work for a few months, not dead. Not a martyr. But now that they’ve tasted blood, it’s going to be harder to keep them in line.”

“In Bonemarche, they say that someone in the White Stane House paid off the mosstaas not to find the killers,” Warreven said. Which leaves Tendlathe, if it isn’t you . He left the words unsaid—he didn’t need to say them; Temelathe would know as well as he what was meant—and Temelathe leaned back in his chair.

“Tendlathe and his friends are frightened. They don’t like change, my son.”

Which was as close to an admission as he was likely to get. Warreven took a deep breath, inhaling the smoke from the brazier, and felt the first familiar touch of the drug’s lassitude. Donnetoil had been a good choice, better than feelgood or dreamsafe; it relaxed without offering visions, made one less cautious, and less argumentative, too. He thought Temelathe was telling the truth, at least about Lammasin’s death, stared at the glowing embers in the center of the stove. He said at last, “I know what I should say, that I’m not afraid of the ghost ranas, but I’m not that stupid. And I know Tendlathe’s temper hasn’t gotten any better. But people are angry. Lammasin was a good man.”