Exiled: Keeper of the City Read online

  Mraal hissed softly—he could see it too—then mastered his anger for the moment and let his breath out more quietly. “Aratel,” he said, “the Eastern cities have changed their leadership many times since you went to war and we were all kits, and milk or no milk, times are not what they were when our fathers led us out to butchery against the East. These mrem want our trade. They need it: their own traditions have stopped them from making things that they need and we have in plenty. And we can use their trade. Sitting here at desert’s edge, we could use another market for our stuffs, one that’s not glutted for grain and cloths like the Western markets are. Our farmers grow more than they can sell West these days—not their fault; the West used to be grain-poor. But the climate’s changed, and now our farming-mrem have to sit on what can’t be sold, hoping it’ll keep till the scarcities hit in the winter—or else they have to burn it all when the granaries get too full. You know all this—at least, you would know it if you hadn’t been sleeping the past two months, for the problem is going to be worse this year than ever. Here we finally have a consortium willing to give a good price for our corn and manufactures, and you want us to drive them out unheard and untried?”

  Aratel said nothing, simply looked away. “But at the same time,” Mraal said, “no need to be incautious. Reswen, I should like your people to, ah, use the means at their disposal to look into what the size of these groups is likely to be. Oh, I know, at the formal meeting this afternoon we’ll ask them, and they’ll tell us something which may be the truth. But I’d like to make sure.”

  “I’ll see to it, Lord,” Reswen said. He said it a little absently. He was still puzzling his way down through the parchment, sorting out details of what things were to be traded, in what amounts. “You don’t have to give them an answer right away, do you?”

  “Even in the West,” Mraal said slowly, with a touch of amusement, “no need for that. No, we’ll manage to keep them here enjoying our hospitality until we know what we need to. There should be no problem with that.... Reswen, what ails you?”

  For Reswen was still gazing at the parchment. “What’s this line at the bottom, Lord?” he said. “ ‘Stone and water’?”

  “Some ceremony,” said another of the Arpekh, a middle-aged councillor named Maiwi. “To seal the pact, we apparently give them a stone and a flask of water from the city. Typical superstitious Eastern kind of thing.”

  Reswen looked up. There was a sort of tickle at the back of his mind, and he had learned a long time ago to pay attention to that tickle. “It seems strange, that’s all. A traditional thing, you would expect them to ask for it informally. Hardly to specify it in the lead-up to the formal agreement.”

  Another of the councillors, Kanesh, a big broad mrem all splotches of orange and black on white, nodded vigorously. “It seemed strange way to me too. To no one else, though.”

  “Kanesh,” Mraal said, “you are probably one of the best-read of us, and expert in the strangenesses of other people. The Colleges would be lost without you. But I can’t see what difference this gesture would make, and I think your book-learning is making you worry unnecessarily here. Let the creatures have their rock and water, if they like. The important thing is arriving at quotas for the amount of grain and cloth we send them.”

  “Brother Lord,” Kanesh said, “this sort of thing is rarely just a gesture. In the stories it can often be a symbol for something that one party or another is too wily to say out loud. Once one city of the East sent another a bunch of arrows—”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, no more stories,” Aratel said, grumpy. Reswen’s tail twitched in momentary anger: The old fool was determined that, since no one had listened to him, no one was going to listen to Kanesh either. “Let’s get on with it and meet with these dirty spies, since it seems some of us want to sell the city out as quickly as possible.”

  “I refuse to hear you, Aratel,” Mraal said, “or your rudeness to a brother Lord, and if necessary, we will put you out of Council and refuse to hear you that way. The Arpekh assembled has decided to consider the Easterners’ proposals, and if the decision was not unanimous, it rarely is. Meanwhile, whether they are friends or enemies-to-be, and the latter I much doubt, we must act like a united body to these mrem, not a bunch of squabbling dodderers fit only to lie in the sun. Hold your tongue, you were best, and act to these people as if you were gently bred, or I’ll toss you out by the scruff like a kit that’s been ripping up the furniture, I swear I will, uncle or no uncle!”

  There was something of a shocked silence at that.

  Aratel stared, his tail bristling, and then very deliberately put his head down and set to washing one paw in a cool and reflective manner.

  “Lord Arpakh,” Kanesh said carefully into that silence, “I would still like to see this matter of the stone and water investigated thoroughly before we agree to it. As you said, no need to be incautious....”

  Mraal waved a paw, unhappy with the discomfort in the room. “Well enough. Perhaps you and Reswen should put your heads together on the subject; if there’s anything clandestine about the matter, he’ll find it out. We will hear your report when next we meet. Lords, let us rise and robe ourselves. Someone call for a runner and send him to the house in Dancer’s Street. Sixth hour, let’s meet with them. The day’s heat will have a chance to pass off, and we should be done in time to let these mrem rest before the feast this evening....”

  The room emptied out. Reswen stood looking at the parchment a moment more before becoming aware of the clerk standing at his elbow: He rolled the document up and gave it to the mrem, then turned to look at Kanesh, who had not moved from his chair. Reswen waited for the door to shut.

  “You know the story about the arrows?” Kanesh said.

  “I do. And I have no desire to do something which an enemy might claim afterwards to have interpreted as unconditional surrender.”

  Kanesh leaned back in his chair. “I have more worries than that, Police master. I think this might be something rather worse.”

  “Such as?”

  “Magic.”

  Reswen flicked one ear back, slightly annoyed. Magic had always struck him as an untidy, un-mremmish thing, more fit for beasts and prey than for people. Of course there were mrem wizards. Certainly the Easterners had them ... had too many of them, to hear some of the stories that came out of the East. There were wizards in the West as well: They tended to keep secret—not that that helped them when Reswen had to hunt them down, as his job sometimes required. Mostly he considered magic and magicians an inconvenience. But he disliked the idea of them.

  Not that that kept Reswen from keeping one on his payroll, of course.

  “If you are truly concerned about that, Lord Arpakh,” he said, “there are avenues through which such a suspicion could be investigated.”

  “Discreetly?”

  “It had better be,” Reswen said. Kanesh grinned, not altogether a pleasant look.

  “I will leave the matter to you, then,” Kanesh said. “You noted the exact wording from the proposal?”

  “ ‘As a token of your good faith and to seal the bargain between us until time immemorial, and for the satisfaction of our Gods, a deal of the bones and a deal of the blood of your City, the same to be given over to us as a token of your City’s endurance and greatness: in the form of a flask of pure water from well or river, and a stone of the City, of the wall or of the rock from which the City is hewn or on which it stands, to signify that our friendship shall be needful as water and enduring as stone—’ ”

  Kanesh nodded. “Your, ah, ‘consultant’ will need those words.”

  “Very well,” Reswen said. “If you would be so kind, have one of your scribes send over a transcript of the meeting with the Easterners when it’s finished. I will be interested to hear what they say about your questions.”

  “So will I.” And Kanesh went out after the others. Reswen
quirked his whiskers in sour resignation and went off to find Lorin.

  He could have sent for him, of course, but it would have attracted attention; and it would also have meant he had to stay in his office. So Reswen got out of the second best kit he had been wearing, and got into some of his worst—a harness of ragged, dirty, worn leather, the fittings not even honestly rusted, because they were base metal. He put his fur badly out of order with a wire comb, a process which took about twenty minutes and left him feeling very mean indeed, and then went out the back door of Constables’ House, the door where they left the garbage to be taken away.

  Lorin’s hovel—there was no use dignifying it with any other name—was not too far from the town’s marketplace. Reswen went straight through the market, as much for a perverse sort of pleasure as anything else. It was one of the great trouble spots of his city-wide beat, almost as bad as some of the upper-class gamers’ and joy-houses. But it was alive and honest, in a filthy way, as none of those were. Here, in the heat of summer, on market day, the place had a horrible, cheerful, cutthroat vitality that drew Reswen even as it repelled him. All the houses around the market turned blind walls to its noise and smells, and any gates were triple-locked. The market square itself was cobbled, and the cobbles were worn, and here and there were great gaping holes where the setts had been stolen (or pried up to throw at someone, usually a policeman); boards covered the worst of these holes, but even some of the smaller ones could make shift to swallow you if you weren’t careful. Above the cobbles was erected a little forest of tents and canopies and sunshades, tattered banners or banners of cloth-of-gold flapping in. the hot breeze over them. The banners were figured with the devices of the merchants under them—fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, bolts of cloth, pots and pans, jewelry, clothes of various kinds, anything one could imagine.

  Reswen walked through the heat, trying not to breathe, then giving it up. The Niauhu market was not kind to the fastidious nose: The smells simply got worse or better depending on where you were and how the wind was setting. He passed the butchers’ tent and had to wave his paws in front of his face to ward off the shrilling clouds of flies. Great carcasses of uxen hung down here, the flies spinning about them, flashing blue and green in the fierce sun, diving in and out of the stink of meat and blood. Then came a smell of musty feather pillows, coming from a tent where a long horizontal pole was festooned with every kind of game fowl—brownwing, setch, lallafen, breastbird. Hung like an afterthought from the end of the pole was a string of hortolans, tiny and brown, like one of the beadstrings the Easterners played with ... except that the beads rarely had tiny still feet sticking out of them. Reswen’s mouth watered. It had been too long since he had had skewered hortolan. I really must do something about that. A nice sweet-and-sour sauce ...

  The assaults to the sense continued, but Reswen slowly began to be distracted from them. It was after all not the market itself that interested him: It was the people in it, his people, many of them the law-abiding mrem he was sworn to protect, many more of them not law-abiding at all, but most behaving themselves for the moment. Without turning aside to right or left, without even trying hard, Reswen could see four pickpockets, six sneak thieves, a suspected murderer (and what is Thailh doing about that investigation? Must check—), a dealer in the chash drug, and a pretty little she-mrem who was in the business of distilling vushein without paying the city license fee. However, there were other of his people patrolling; it was all their business at the moment ... and besides, the bootlegger and two of the pickpockets were merely doing their shopping, and being scrupulous about paying the shopkeepers. Reswen smiled to himself. When the nearest neighboring city was so far away, it did not do to get on bad terms with the grocers and fishmongers. A mrem could starve to death in short order.

  Reswen went on through the yelling, laughing, arguing crowd, listening to bargains being hawked (and purported bargains), watching a stallkeeper caught giving short measure get hauled off to one of the constables, being bumped into by housewives with panniers of smelly fish. You could do the best you could to concentrate on the faces—bland, intent, angry, uncaring—but there was no escaping for long the market’s assault on the senses. Over one ragged, striped canopy from which the sun had nearly bleached the stripes, a pole supported a banner with a faded red flower on it, and from that tent came smells almost more overpowering then the butchers’ and knackers’. It was the perfumer’s stall, and the wind seized a fistful of musk and nightbloom and day’s-eye and thahla and almost every other perfume Reswen knew, and threw them at him all at once. The sweet reek almost undid him, He staggered away from it, muttering, refusing even to look at the jars of essences and dried flower petals, and kept on going through the marketplace. Next came the hide-sellers, and some of the hides were still raw; the mrem did wholesale business as well as retail, selling to those who liked to finish their own leathers, as well as those who preferred it done for them. Reswen almost turned and headed back for the perfumer’s at the first whiff of old dung and ammonia ... then he kept going. He was almost out the other side.

  And then he was out: The crowd thinned suddenly, the dark cool tunnel-archway to the Lanes opened up before him. He dove into it, gratefully, as if into a cave. This had once been a city wall, before Niau outgrew it. There were houses built into it in places, and on a day like this Reswen imagined that the six-foot-thick walls would be a comfort.

  At the end of the tunnel there was sunlight, but not nearly as much as there was in the market; it was blocked away by ricketies. These were buildings thrown up in a hurry a long time ago. Walking hurriedly under their leaning shadows, Reswen considered that “thrown up” might be the correct idiom.

  Several centuries before, Niau had been the focus of a migration from several of the smaller cities to the north, whose crops had gone bad. To house the sudden influx of desperately willing labor, the ricketies had been built: hasty beam-and-clapboard buildings with barely any skeleton to keep them up, buildings that leaned on one another for support. Once, Reswen supposed, they might not have shown the leaning much, but these days one end of the long, twisting block leant against the wall, and all the others sagged toward that end and also sagged downward and inward into the street. Only the dry climate had preserved them this long ... but worm and dry rot had set in long ago, and every now and then; one of the ricketies fell down. Or more correctly, five or six of them, Reswen thought, for the balance among buildings had become so precarious that knocking just one down was probably impossible. Sometimes he wished for a good fire to clean the whole area out; it was a notable nest of the worst kinds of crime. But that would have been cruel. Many mrem lived here who could not afford even the few coppers a month it would take to see them in cleaner, safer accommodation. They tended to stay there till they died, one way or another. The Arpekh occasionally threatened to tear the whole mess down, but there would usually be an enraged protest by the inhabitants, and the threat would go away. The inhabitants of the ricketies would make enough of a mob to “burn any Arpakh’s house around his ears.

  It was in one of these edifices that Lorin lived, at the bottom of one no less. No one but a wizard would have the nerve to live on the ground floor of one of these rattraps, Reswen thought as Lorin’s place loomed up over him, casting a shadow. It was one of the more wretched of the places, a three-story-high pockmarked facade with plaster gouged away by time, the beams showing bare. Between two of the beams on the ground level, a warped door hung awry, with some symbol marked on the door in chalk. Someone had used the dirt beside the doorstep as a sandbox.

  Reswen sighed and knocked on the door. There was a rustling from inside, and a yellow eye appeared at the crack where the door failed to meet the doorjamb properly. “No betting today,” a high-pitched voice said.

  Reswen rolled his eyes. Lorin made his official living as a bookmaker, taking bets on the Games, and on some of the less savory sports that the mrem of the ricketies used to while aw
ay their misery. “Look at me, idiot,” Reswen muttered.

  There was a pause, then a sound of someone breathing out “Right,” said the voice, and Lorin unlatched for him.

  Reswen stepped in hurriedly. There were people in this part of town who might recognize him, and it was not entirely wise to be here alone. The door banged to behind him as he stood looking around the place. It never failed. When he came here, which he tried to have happen as seldom as possible, he could always hear his dear dead dam’s voice saying, “You don’t appreciate where you live, Reswen. There are poor people in this world who would kill to have as nice a place as we do.” And Reswen would think back to the wretched little cottage where he grew up, and say to himself, She was right after all. The floor of the—he stretched a term—flat was hard, sour, rammed dirt, nothing better; Lorin usually managed to filch some straw to hide the sheer awfulness of it. Almost all the plaster had fallen away from the beams, leaving the barest shell between the room and the street “For all the gods’ sake,” Reswen said, and his tone of voice reminded him of his mother’s, “Lorin, why don’t you get someplace decent to live? I’ll give you a raise.”

  “I like it here,” Lorin said, coming around to sit back down at the rude bench and table where he had been working when Reswen arrived. Lorin fairly well fit the classic picture of a pauper: He was a sharply striped gray tabby, mangy and lean, with big round eyes that looked astonished at everything. Reswen sat down on the other bench and kept quiet for a moment, because Lorin had pushed up the sleeves of his ragged tunic and was counting what might have been the morning’s takings. The table was a welter of scraps of parchment and thick rough paper, and money of all kinds held the scraps of paper down—coppers and silvers, a gold coin here and there, elsewhere a piece of paper scrip with a pebble to hold it down.