Jo Clayton: Shadow of the Warmaster

“Fool!” Kumari patted him on the cheek. “Cuteness has warped your pea brain.”

He growled at her, fell silent as a pair of serviteurs came humming up with large trays. Spice tea, crisp wafers, small glass bowls with sections of local fruit, glass skewers to eat them with. The tea service was native clay, rough glazed, a warm dark brown with hints of rust and a deep blue shadow where the glaze was smooth, the drinking bowls generous with a restrained elegance of form.

Adelaar lifted one of the bowls, cupped it in her hand, enjoying its weight and texture. “Local?”

“One of my neighbors downstream, she’s got a patch of kaolin she’s been working for the past thirty years.” Quale came through an arch and dropped into the fourth chair. “Do anything for thirty years and you tend to get good at it. Pour for us, Kumari.”

He sat sipping at the tea and watching the storm. Adelaar skewered a slice of ruby fruit, ate it. It was good, a mix of bloodheart plum and citrus, firm, fleshy, full of juice; she closed her eyes, swallowed the fruit, savoring the blend of flavors in her mouth and the drama of the storm against her ears. She thrust the skewer through a rose-pink wedge, sniffed at it, crunched her teeth into it, smiled at the spurt of sweet tart flavor. Alternating bites of wafer and fruit, washing them down with sips of tea, she took the edge off a hunger she hadn’t noticed before.

After several minutes of silence, Quale turned his head. “You send your driver off?”

“T’k, I forgot him, I left him sleeping in his flickit.” She grimaced at the rain. “I hope the thing doesn’t leak.”

“Who?”

“Sour type called Oormy, Sounds unlikely, but that’s what I made of his mutter.”

“Ha! the Worm. No one else would bring you?”

“No.” She smoothed her fingers over the textured glaze of her bowl. “What do you want me to do? Go back to Daruze and wait? I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“No. Of course not. Ship’s lander is coming down here, we’re not going anywhere near the city. Unless you have something there you need to retrieve?”

“My case in the flickit, that’s all I have.”

“Hmm. Let Worm sleep till the storm’s over. He can’t fly in that stuff anyway.” He reached under the table, pulled up a servitrage, ordered the housekeep to fetch Adelaar’s case the moment the rain stopped and tell the driver Oormy to go home. After he clipped the trage away, he set his elbows on the table, clasped his hands. “About time you did some talking, mmm?”

“Time… how much longer will this storm last?”

“An hour, maybe a little more.”

“Ah.” She closed her eyes, weariness sweeping through her, three plus years working alone, never knowing if the next day, next hour, next minute would see her banging her head against a barrier even she couldn’t get through or around, or in a trap that got her ashed, three plus years until Quale said Done and the deal was closed. Three plus years stretched taut, then the elastic broke. It hadn’t hit her up there in the office, but now… Now, soothed by the sounds of the storm, the tea and fruit a warm comfortably heavy lump in her middle, a need to talk washed over her, frightening her, at the same time luring her to say things she’d never said even to herself, to say more than she’d said to anyone since Churri the Bard. She understood what was happening to her, the euphoria that came from a sudden release of tension, but understanding was no help at all. “Mind if I ramble a bit?”

“Why not. I need to get the feel of things.” His voice was distant, almost lost in the storm noises, as seductive as her exhaustion. “Just talk, whatever you feel like saying.”

“Mmm.” Eyes still closed, she slid down in the chair until her head rested on the back; she never sat like this in public, never, but she was too tired to care, just moving a finger made her body ache. “You know anything about the Saber worlds? I can understand that. Still, people did go there, especially to Sonchйren, sunsets and opal mines, chasm falls and tantserbok, hunters came from all over to hunt the tantserbok. I never understood those types, going after beasts no one could eat or use; their flesh was poison, their skin wouldn’t tan, it rotted in three days no matter what you tried. And more hunters died than tantserboks, five hunters out, one back. The ratio changed now and then, never in favor of the hunters, but all those dead seemed to make the next ones more eager. Can you explain that to me, Quale? Can you make it make sense? I think stupidity can’t be genetic, it has to be a birth defect or something like that. Why else with the kill rate like it is are there so many idiots around? Ah, that was a long time ago. Churri came to see the sunsets. Churri the Bard he called himself, a poet of sorts, I’m no judge; he moved me, but my brothers laughed at him. He was a little man, I’m not tall and he’d tuck under my chin, he got me so messed up, I didn’t know which end was where, god I hate that phrase, I don’t know why I use it, one of my brothers caught us, nearly killed Churri, he took off and didn’t stop till he was on a ship going somewhere else. A month later I was being sick in the morning and bloating up like a milaqq in a cloudburst…”

Her voice trailed off, she opened her eyes a slit and examined Quale. There was something about him that reminded her of Churri, she couldn’t decide what it was, but then she wasn’t all that good at reading people. Not his looks, Churri’d been bald as an egg and dark amber all over, with bronze cat eyes that laughed a lot though never at himself. A streak of cruelty with little malice in it, like the cruelty of a cat, a spinoff of the curiosity, passion, detachment that fueled his poetry. Aslan had inherited the curiosity and the passion, but hadn’t yet acquired that detachment, probably never would. Quale, what was it about him, something of that same detachment? that playful painful digging into the other’s, well, call it soul? Quale had an easy way of moving, but Churri was made of springsteel and sunfire, to look at him made her shiver. Quale was amiable, competent enough but low in energy. Tepid, that was the word. Churri was restless and unpredictable, he seemed easily seduced into tangents but was not, no, that was his cunning; he was a stubborn little git, when he wanted something, he got it, her for one. That was something else their daughter had inherited; she was about as biddable as a black hole before she could walk or talk. Ahh, it didn’t matter, probably just a question of hormones. I was upset and tired, let my guard down. She shut her eyes.

“My father was a man of great honor, hmm! He shut me in a cell and brought in whores to tend me because no decent woman should have to look at me.

It’s a miracle or good genes, take your pick, that I lived through that time and Aslan was born healthy. My father left her with me till she was weaned, then he gave her to a baby market. If she’d been a boy he might have kept her though I don’t think so, she looked too different, skin was too dark, eyes were gold-like Churri’s, not washy blue like his. Me, he sold into contract labor. Not to Bolodo, to a smaller Contractor, one you could get loose from if you had the brains and drive. I don’t like thinking about that time, but it taught me what it took to survive when you didn’t have a family back of you. After three years I managed to buy out and I went looking for Aslan. Seems to be a habit, that. Found her too. Things were fine for a while, I was doing this and that, pulling in enough credit to keep us comfortable. Apprenticed myself to a minor genius and learned everything he wanted to teach me and a lot he didn’t want out of his hands. Until Aslan hit puberty. And I turned into my father. T’k. We had some royal fights. Aslan was smarter than I’d been, no roving poets for her, but she didn’t like my friends, she found them boring, nauseating, unethical, she had an obsession about ethics, don’t know where she picked it up, it was bad as a deformity for scaring people off, she didn’t like what I was doing, ethics again, she wanted no part of my friends or my business. The rows got worse, nothing physical, we weren’t that sort, but we were clawing at each other with words and she was very good with words, better than I was, I sputtered and yelled and got frustrated, but she never lost her tongue. We loved each other, but we couldn’t live together. So Aslan went to University.” Adelaar sighed.