Jay Lake - Endurance

We both spoke at once. “Told me what?” “I was doing so.”

Kohlmann gave me a long look. “It is clear to me that the Selistani embassy is a sham. They are only here for you. We cannot order them to leave, for we would be embarrassed of resources to compel them to our will. The council has voted to withdraw the protection offered to you before. You are charged instead with disposing of your personal matters without further harm to the city of Copper Downs.”

“These troubles belong to you, Green,” Jeschonek added. “You must take them away from our door.”

“You bastards,” I shouted, leaping to my feet with my short knife in hand. To their credit, neither man flinched. My blood boiled, but to what end? I slipped the weapon away, glaring at both of them as if my eyes could slice their skin. “You disgust me. I never mistook the Interim Council to be friendly to me, but my faith in our common interests was clearly misplaced.”

Kohlmann stepped back as I reached the door. He was afraid of me. Good. I gave him a flesh-rending smile. Even more hard words rolled in my head, but I kept them to myself and departed without further discussion. They did not trouble to call me back.

In the upper hallway, the clerks cowered. I had not realized we were so loud. When they cowered downstairs as well, I understood it was me that frightened them, not the shouting. I stalked out into Lyme Street, holding back tears that shamed me horribly.

Me.

Crying!

Not now, not for insults as foolish and petty as these.

But they were still bastards.

All I could do was walk off the tension. I needed to drain my anger before I could sensibly take further action. There was risk to me, and the ghost Erio had believed there to be risk to the city. Too many players, too many plots. I had to deal with the Selistani embassy, with the pardines, and with Blackblood’s moves against me. The Interim Council would be no help. The next most obvious answer was to turn my enemies against one another.

But in my current state of agitation, I could not manage to conceive of a decent plan, let alone hope to carry it out.

I stomped toward the Dockmarket instead. Some piece of homely cheese might do me good. Likewise a crowd of indifferent people about their occasions, happy or sad as the mood took them, none bearing arms with my name written on the back of their hand. No one at the Dockmarket would care who or what I was. I could lose myself for an hour or two in their pressing mass, be distracted by chandlers or toymakers or weaponsmiths, then find myself sufficiently recovered to survey what must follow. At least the day was decent, a late gasp of autumn granting us all warm sun and clear skies without the knife-edged winter wind.

The Dockmarket was busy as ever. Trade might be down, but there were few vacant stalls. Tired old women hawked handfuls of trinkets from the tops of bollards. A clown juggled pigeons, tossing the birds like stones until they fluttered back into his hands. Fruitiers and greengrocers occupied wide spreads of stalls, their produce ranked in colorful arrays like a nursery paint box. Laughing children ran through the market clutching brown-spotted summer apples and thin coins stolen from the careless. I smelled food frying, flowers rotting, machine oil, spices, the acrid scent of blades being sharpened on a grinding wheel, the dung of a dozen kinds of animals. The sounds likewise made such a distraction. Blue-robed memory men squatting on the distorted faces of ancient, fallen idols chanted histories. Hogs bellowed their fear before the sledge took them in the skull. Chains jingled, babies shrieked, hammers fell.

This place was as close to the comforting chaos of Kalimpura as I was likely to find in Copper Downs. I slipped into the rhythms of the eddying crowds, falling into the habits of a Blade on a run-my stance, the set of my shoulders, how close I kept my weapons. Realizing this, I forced myself to relax. This was not the place of my enemies. The city of Copper Downs did not oppose me. Only some people in it, most of them foreigners.

I caught myself at that thought. Selistani. My own people were not foreigners.

Or were they?

A crowded space of split-log benches offered a chance for folk a-marketing to pause and consume the food they’d purchased, or rearrange the goods they’d bought. I slipped onto a sawn stump, glad for the respite. This was not the time for thinking, this was the time for clearing my head. But I needed a moment. At least the anger had subsided. Calm had not yet returned.

Though people were packed in here, the rest did me good. I’d been raised in isolation behind the Factor’s bluestone walls. Even so, my years in Kalimpura had inured me to crowds. I looked up at the low, scattered clouds of the autumn sky and wondered how this market might appear to a bird overhead, or some weather god with a heaven’s-eye view of the world. We would be as termites in their mound, laboring for our colorful scraps of food and cloth.

Something in that image comforted me. Kalimpuri were not so different from those of the Stone Coast, when viewed from far away.

My reverie was interrupted by a cry in Hanchu. I looked up to see a small elderly man being backed against the slats of a melon stall by half a dozen youths. The Dockmarket was not so dangerous, except perhaps for pickpockets, but these things sometimes happened. People pushed by without looking or stopping to help. It was unlikely anyone in authority would even happen along, let alone intervene.

To the Smagadine hells with that, I thought. I had a soft spot for elderly Hanchu men, thanks to my time with Lao Jia, the old cook aboard Southern Escape who’d shown me such kindness when I first had fled Copper Downs after my slaying of the Duke.

I jumped to my feet, trotted over, and announced myself to the thugs by swiftly kicking two of them behind the knee, dropping the miscreants to the stinking cobbles mashed with rotten vegetables and animal dung. I showed the other four my short knives. “You will have a better day elsewhere,” I growled.

One opened his mouth to protest-or threaten-so I opened the muscles of his forearm. At the sight of blood, they scattered.

Turning to the old man I’d rescued, I tried to frame an apology in Hanchu. I paused a moment to take stock of what I saw. He wore a long buttoned cassock in a saffron-dyed cotton weave with turned-in seams, carefully wrought handwork from the look of it. Distinctive enough, but not the richly embroidered silk and cloth frog closures typical of the better class of Hanchu attire.

“Bid welcome,” I said in my limited, stumbling command of his language. “Take your ease.” Except for discussions of food and cooking, and certain expletives, that greeting nearly depleted my store of words.

“And well met,” he replied in Hanchu. Switching to accented Petraean, the old man continued, “We are lost in this marvelous city, and subject to the attentions of tasteless persons. You are foreign as well. Can you perhaps help direct us with more kindness than the last I asked?”

We turned out to be the man I’d rescued and another small, elderly man who could have been his twin. No, I realized, the other man was his twin. They were matched, even to the point of holding their heads the same way-slightly cocked like a pair of wading birds stalking loaches in the reedy shallows. Looking back, I realize now the gods could not have sent me a sign more clear than that.

I ignored it with the self-assured folly of youth.

“My profound gratitude for the rescue,” the second brother said. “As well as the courtesy. Few here know our country or our language. Your people look inward, not outward.”

I turned the deep brown skin on the back of my hand toward them, and brushed it with the fingers of my other hand to draw attention to the color. “You have already seen that these are not my people, though I abide here. This is a land of pale folk with ideas that are sometimes pale as well.” I’d thought Federo a maggot-man when I met him, the very first of these northerners I’d ever laid eyes upon. “I would be pleased to aid you if I am able.”