Jo Clayton: Shadow of the Warmaster

He moved past taverns and shops and other small businesses. For the first time he heard voices though he saw no one and none of the businesses were open.

He heard a steady creaking as he drew near the largest of the circles with its speaker minaret a topped-out stone tree in the middle. He remembered the last time he stood there, crowds pressing about him, Geres Duvvar bringing him a paper cone of hot nuts. His grief over the loss of his cousin intensified suddenly, as if he felt it for the first time. He stood looking at the wall he and Geres Duvvar had leaned against while they listened to the Stentor shout. After a while he was aware of the creaking again. He looked up. A body was suspended from the speaker’s platform. A hanged man. He moved around so he could see who it was. “Herk,” he breathed. The Fehdaz’s face was black and distorted and he was stripped naked, but there was no question who hung there. Another memory came back full force-Elmas Ofka that night she found her brother dead of torture. Herk will pay, she said. It may take years, but Herk will pay.

He shrugged. This wasn’t Elli’s work, she was too busy organizing the world. It didn’t matter. Herk the Jerk had enemies enough to guarantee he’d end like this. Without asking himself why he was doing it, he climbed the verdigrised spiral to the platform and cut the rope. He heard Herk’s body hit the stones with a loose boneless splat; the Fehdaz must have been hanging there for hours, more than a day, long enough for the death-stiffness to pass out of him. They took him when the Surge was just starting here, he thought, that’s why they hung him instead of tearing him apart.

He climbed back down and stood over the body. It hadn’t begun to stink yet, the weather was too cold for that. He pressed his fingers hard against his eyes. Too many memories here, he couldn’t let Herk dirty them. He dropped his hands and looked around for a place to put him.

The timbers of the Fekkri Gate were burned to stumps like rotted teeth and the pile itself was a shell, no more. He got Herk up and over his shoulder, carried the body into the Fekkri court and dropped it on the paving stones.

He left, brushing at himself, a little nauseated. He moved more quickly now, he had a better reason than duty to visit his House. He wanted a bath.

Goza House was in the southeast section of the city, where the Little Houses were and the tenements for the poor, the warehouses, the retting sheds and other factories, down near the water’s edge.

The two parts of the main gate were moving in the wind, but not enough to swing closed. Seeing them like that made him angry. The gates of the Great Houses were closed, latched, probably locked though he had not thought to try them. Here the Houses were left open to the wind and whatever thieves escaped the Surge, here where the people were poor and not important. He went through the wall-arch and into the Front Court.

The wind blew dead leaves into dust devils. A solitary spray of rain hit him in the face. The House was dead. Everyone was gone, even the Elders. He folded his arms across his chest, hugged them tight against him. It was like his grief for Geres Duvvar, and somehow worse. There was no focus, only a free-floating desolation. “They make a desolation and call it peace,” he said aloud.

“What’s that mean?”

Karrel Goza looked around, not seeing who it was who spoke to him.

Tazmin Duvvar stepped from the Duvvar Court, stood leaning against a gate pillar. “What’s that?” he repeated.

“Someone said it a long time ago and a long way from here. I don’t know who or where. The Outsider at the Mines, the teacher, you remember, she told it to her students and one of them told it to me. It just came to mind.”

“Mmh, morbid,” Tazmin Duvvar said. “Sounds to me like you need a hot meal and a night’s sleep. Let your liver sweeten.”

“How long you been back?”

“I got here yesterday morning. I wasn’t ferrying yips about like you, cousin. One look at the looting there at the Palace and I thought hard times are coming and I better make sure we’ve got the stuff to ride ’em out, that it didn’t walk out in some stranger’s pouch.”

“You see Herk?”

“Hard to miss. Wonder who did it?”

Karrel Goza stretched, yawned. “One thing I know, half Inci’s going to claim they were in on it. Any hot water?”

“Started the boilers this morning. Bath?”

“Yeh. I cut the bastard down, I didn’t like seeing him there. Dumped him in the Fekkri Court. I need to wash him off me.”

Tazmin Duvvar looked up at the clouds, ignoring another brief flurry of rain. “Somebody’s going to have to do something about him if the wind keeps on in this direction; another day or two and we’ll be smelling him.” He moved away from the pillar and followed Karrel Goza around the house. “What’s happening in Gilisim? Did they ever find Old Pittipat or the Grand Sech?”

“Not yet. What’s happening?” Karrel Goza stripped off his jacket and began undoing the fastenings on his shirt. “More of everything you saw before you cut out. More looting, more dead. People wandering around like they’re walking in their sleep. We haven’t begun to sort out who’s what and where they belong, let alone identified the dead. The best guess I heard is as much as a third of us is dead somewhere around Gilisim. It’s going to be a job, getting them buried. Elmas Ofka, her isyas and the Council from the Mines, they’ve got together with vips from the west coast and up from Guneywhiyk. Trying to work out how to organize things now there aren’t any more Huvved and the slave techs are gone, most of them. It’s a mess, Taz. Every one of them has his own idea how to run things. Bless the Prophet, Elli smoothes them down and gets them to start making sense. Not that she’s any saint herself; we’re going to have to watch and make sure she doesn’t take up where Tra Yarta left off.” He pulled open the door to the bathhouse, went in.

Tazmin Duvvar lit the lamps while Karrel Goza started the water running and finished stripping, then he came back and settled on the towel bench, his feet up on the coping about the tub. “You figure we going to get any say at all?”

Karrel Goza slid into the water, shivering as the heat closed round him. He settled his head on the neckrack, closed his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “What we get, we’ll have to take. I did some talking with young Hayal Halak, him from gul Brindar. One of that woman’s students, he was the one who told me the desolation/peace quote. He went inklin for a while before he came to the Mines, he loves the Great Families about as much as he loves Huvved. He picked up some ideas from that woman that sound good, the Greats won’t like ’em, the Ommars either. I think Elli’s going to back him; a lot of them off the Sea Farms might too, they don’t want to see the Greats getting a stranglehold on trade. Isn’t going to be easy. Toss me the soap, eh?”

“Here. Way things are, looks to me like whoever’s ready first is the one who’s gonna take it. Hay and his bunch got their shots planned?”

Karrel Goza soaped the washcloth, scrubbed at his arm. “Planned is one thing, doing is something else.” He balanced an ankle on his knee, began washing his toes. “We’ve got numbers on our side. The Greats don’t smell very sweet to a lot of people, they kissed too much Huvved ass. We could lose it, though, if Brindars won’t talk to Incers and Incers won’t talk to Samlikkaners, and nobody talks to grasslanders, you know how it goes. You, me, the rest of them who took the Warmaster, we’ve got credit we’re going to have to spend.” He switched feet and stopped talking.

Tazmin Duvvar thought that over, then he nodded. “You’ll have to give me the primer version,” he said. “I was never much good at the books, but I tell you this, I can talk a tickler into giving it away free, sit me in a tavern and let me chat her up. Lot of folk out there need that primer same as me. I can get them to give it a hearing. Can’t ask for more.”