Babylon Steel (44 page)

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Isn’t it time you told us that?” Flower said.

“Look, I’m horrified that Denarven got in here, I take total responsibility for that. No, shut up, Previous, it was up to me and I didn’t do it.”

“It’s not that little squit we’re talking about,” Flower said, “Though why the hells you didn’t let me tackle him...” he went off into his own language, which I don’t speak, but it didn’t sound complimentary. Then he switched back to Lithan.

“For an intelligent woman, Babylon, you can be pretty stupid.”

That was no news to me.

“Which doesn’t mean
we
are,” Flower went on. “You’ve been going around looking like you just got volunteered for a suicide mission the last few days. Clariel’s turned up,
here.
”

“So much for that deglamour she was wearing,” I muttered.

Flower waved a hand. “Please. You think I can’t smell the Lodestone kitchens? Then Darask Fain, of all people. You haul Previous down the sewers, come back drenched in blood...”

“It wasn’t ours.”

“Not the point. You haven’t been telling us what’s going on.”

“Look, it’s sorted,” I said. “Denarven’s in custody, Enthemmerlee’s safe.”

“Enthemmerlee!” Laney actually stamped her foot, and her eyes were shading to red. This is never a good sign in a Fey. “It’s
you
we’re worried about. There are things going on you’re not telling us, Babylon.”

“Laney, I know, and I’m sorry. I never meant for things to get this crazed.” I looked at them all. There was no way of avoiding this – or at least, not unless I was prepared to sneak out of my own place, out of my own life, like a thief. And I wasn’t going to, not this time. “Look, you’d better all come into the kitchen.”

We sat around the big scrubbed table, except for Flower, who started cutting meat. I rested my hands on the clean, dented wood, for the comfort of it.

“Listen,” I said. “I have something I have to do, and I have to go, now. Today. And, well, there’s a fair chance I won’t make it back. So... I just needed to tell you. I haven’t... there’s money. Damn. I can’t leave you my seal. You’ll have to... I need paper. I’ll give you my signature, for the banker at the Exchange. Sorry. I should have gone there earlier, I didn’t think...”

“Wait,” Previous said. “Hold up. What?”

I sighed. “I can’t tell you the whole story, I haven’t time, but there are people I need to deal with. I have to make things right.”

“But who are they?” Laney said.

“Avatars. Demigods, if you like. On my home plane. They, well, let’s just say I think they stole the power they have and it’s up to me to take it away. And I can only do it during Twomoon. I may be too late already, I’d have gone yesterday if... anyway. I have to go.”

There was a silence while everyone looked at each other, then they were all talking at once. I held up my hand, and for once, they shut up. “I’m sorry, I really am. I hate to leave you like this, but judging by yesterday, you’ll all be safer if I’m out of the way.”

“We’ll come with you!” Laney said. “We can help.”

“No, Laney. I’ve put you all in enough danger recently, I’m damned if I’m dragging you to Tiresana with me. It’s not Scalentine, you know. The Avatars have powers, there. I’ve seen them use them. They can kill, and they’ll do it. Because you’re in the way, or just because they feel like it. And killing’s not even the worst of it... no. No-one’s coming with me.”

“So you’re just going to leave?” Flower said. His apron was smeared with blood.

“I don’t have a choice.”

They looked at each other. Then Flower brought the cleaver down on the chopping board, where it stuck, the blade gleaming in the mellow autumn sun. “At least let me make you up some food. The All knows what sort of rubbish you’ll get travelling.”

“Thank you, Flower. Laney, if you can, I need something that will work against charisma. Can you...”

She sniffed. “I suppose so.”

N
O-ONE BUT
F
LOWER
was about when I left. I could hear movement in the rooms, but not one of them came out.

I knew they were angry, but I hadn’t realised
how
angry. I’d have welcomed even an argument, though it would have delayed me more, which I couldn’t afford. Silently, Flower handed me the package of food, and a battered hipflask.

“I put some golden in there.”

“Thanks. Flower...”

“You’ll miss the tide,” he said; he put a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned away. When I got outside I realised there wasn’t even anyone guarding the front. I wondered whether I should say something, but Flower had pulled the door shut.

I walked towards the docks feeling like her again, that silent, hard-bitten woman with an empty heart and little else but scars. I managed to get passage on the
Misty Morning,
heading for Galent.

My one advantage was that I was fairly certain the Avatars would travel in comfort, in luxury as far as they could manage it. If I sacrificed everything to speed, I could get there, if not ahead of them, then at least hard at their backs.

I stood on the deck, listening to the roar and chatter of the docks, the creak of ropes and snap of sails. The light of the portal arc flared off the water like another kind of liquid, rich and thick. I could see the tower in the town square; I realised I was peering to see if I could make out the Red Lantern. As the anchor chain rattled up, I turned away. I gripped the rail, and shut my eyes as we passed through the portal.

I’d almost forgotten that bone deep inward shudder – the sense that all your insides have shifted slightly to the left of your outsides – that comes with passing a portal. In all my years of travelling I’d never got used to it.

The
Misty Morning
was a stripped-down merchant vessel, made to outrun her competitors. She had few comforts. We didn’t stop at Larians, the city that mirrors Scalentine on the far side of Bealach portal, but bucked our way through the storm-passes of Flogen and the Lower Reaches and rode the alignment tides to Galent. Three hours. Empty in the stomach and shaking in the legs, I disembarked, handed out bribes and smiles at high speed, and went through the portal to Loth, where in a thick heat buzzing with insects the size of my hand I hired a vehicle of light strong wood, drawn by three pairs of leggy, nervous beasts with four legs, huge eyes, long necks and soft grey feathers. Their driver looked like a fat green dog. The thing was fast, but damned uncomfortable; I was thrown around like a dried pea in a child’s rattle. Three more hours, or thereabouts.

I tumbled out, bruised, at Ithackt and headed straight for the portal. I had a nasty hour or so there, trying to be smiling and persuasive with my stomach doing somersaults, handing out Antheran’s bits of paper and more bribes than an aunt with her favourite nephews. Finally I was allowed through.

From there another overland; I hired... something. It was biddable, steerable, fast, and knew the road. It seemed to be some sort of mobile shrub with a kind of wooden scoop in which one sat, while brushlike legs whisked along the dusty purple track. Around me, spires of gleaming black rock jabbed at the greenish sky. Another portal. Busy; lots of people, all in a hurry. No need for bribes, I was waved through impatiently. By now I was so tired and sick I could hardly stand, or see. Time, sliding past me like the road. A ship of sorts; driven by teams of rowers, across a lake of thick pink fluid that smelled of dying flowers, where half-seen creatures like huge, slate-coloured ghosts swam alongside, the slow balletic sweep of their great fanlike fins sending out ripples of roseate light.

Another portal city. Slow conversations with greedy officials, fumbling among the currencies I still had, all made worse by my inability to string together more than half a sentence by then. Finally, with a lurch, I fell through the threshold into Flai, barely conscious.

Someone hauled me up and dumped me on a hard bench. Once things stopped swaying like a topmast in a storm, I opened my eyes.

The architecture was familiar; the residents of Flai seem to have a liking for everything square, grey and cold. I started to shiver, and dug in my pack for something to throw over me, then remembered I’d only packed a spare shirt.

I put it on. I was surrounded by Flaians: green-marbled skin, skeletal features, ratty naked tails, no hair.

One of them bent over me, and said, in bad Lithan, “You can’t stay here. Transit here only. Where you going?”

“Tiresana.”

“Next transport for Tiresana portal, over there, you go wait.”

Once I could stand, I went to where they had pointed: a boxy shelter that didn’t do much to hold off a chilly penetrating drizzle.

I remembered this. The shuttered, unfriendly look of the streets, the grim slab-like building they’d created around the portal, the smoky metallic smell that was the result of something they mined in the hills above the town.

When I’d come through I’d stayed barely a day, so eager to be as far away as I could, that I’d taken up with the first group leaving within hours who’d wanted a guard. Flai has two portals that I know of; I’d left through the other one.

If I’d known all this time how close to Tiresana I was during alignment, I’d probably have reached Scalentine and just kept running.

The transport arrived, grey. A wheeled cart, drawn by miserable looking droop-necked beasts. Also grey. We plodded through the rain.

Once I’d put one of Flower’s honey-cakes in my clangingly hollow stomach and recovered a little, I stared out at veils of rain sweeping the grey hills. I was gripping the side of the cart as though the pressure of my hands could speed it. The beasts moved in a slow, muddy trudge towards the Tiresana portal; I knew we were going faster than I could have on foot, but I felt time hissing at my back.

The more I tried not to think about the Lantern, the more images crowded me: Flower putting food on the table, roaring for people to eat while it was hot; Essie and Jivrais thundering up and down the stairs, giggling; Laney putting on the Fey Princess for all she was worth with a new client, and the expression on her face when she got an extremely expensive and extraordinarily ugly necklace for her pains. Previous red-faced with laughter as she hauled in someone who’d tried to run without paying... and been tripped by his own unlaced trousers, ending up face-down and bare-arsed at the bottom of the steps. Ireq, watching it all, barely speaking, often smiling. And the Chief, seated over the chess-board, his long finger tapping the corner of his mouth as he considered his next move. The melancholy lines of his face lifting into a smile. My last sight of him, changed, pacing, still marked with the blood of the madman he’d hauled off me.

By the time we reached Ithakt, the portal town to Tiresana, I was beyond weeping; cold and grey and empty as the Flai landscape.

Ithakt was yet another lump of blocky buildings, almost identical to the one we’d left. The familiar and by now, to me, fairly loathsome hum of a portal was audible before the cart pulled to a halt; the beasts simply stopping, as though they saw no point in walking further, ever again.

There was a certain tension in the air. Flaians are hard to read, at least for me. But in most races a tendency to shift about, look over one’s shoulder, and keep half-consciously checking for your weapons is definitely a sign of nerves.

I wondered what they knew, or guessed.

And for the first time there were Tiresans: thin, weary, scared, decked with packs and rolled sleeping mats and squalling babies. Tiresans, leaving. How bad had things got? Tiresans don’t leave. Except for me.

I knew there was hardly any chance I’d be recognised, not after all this time. But still I stooped, ducked my head, turned my face away. No-one was looking anyway; they were more concerned with keeping track of children and goods and dealing with their own terrors than eyeing another rain-drenched refugee.

The guards were herding them onto transports, heading them out. I wondered where they were all going.

The guards were the only ones who looked at me. They made no attempt to stop me, although they cast glances at each other as I stood looking at the portal. It was smaller than I remembered, its arc an uneasy shifting mix of grey and orange, casting queasy lights on the rough stone floor.

For a moment I wasn’t sure if I could do it.

I could still turn back. I could go home, and be safe – for as long as it took the Avatars to realise their mistake and come looking for me. Or as long as it took for me to sicken of my own cowardice.

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and with one hand on my sword, I stepped through.

I felt that subterranean shudder and then the smell of ghost-lilies and desert and sandmules, the smell of my past, closed over me like a hungry mouth.

M
Y KNEES BUCKLED,
but at least this time I didn’t fall.

The portal town of Mantek had grown a little since I’d left, but not much, in more than ten years, and the newer buildings looked shoddy and dull. It was disturbingly quiet; even those waiting to leave (all Tiresans, every one of them, not a foreign trader to be seen) stood meekly, waiting. When I’d left it had been a bustling, comfortingly crowded place.

Perhaps because I’d been the only one entering, rather than leaving, a few people glanced at me. Some of the glances seemed to linger a little too long. I told myself I was being foolish.

As I came out into the open, the sun had just dropped below the horizon. I remembered it all. The particular pale blue of the sky, the dusty purple outline of the mountains in the distance, the fleshy curves of the dunes rolling towards the horizon.

I could hear something else that was all too familiar: the hissing, fussing and bellowing of sandmules from a nearby livery stable. Sandmules. That was one thing I’d been happy to leave behind.

This lot looked worse than I remembered: scraggy, ribby, harsh-coated, wall-eyed and vicious. I took my time over it, trying to choose the one that looked healthiest and least psychotic.

I was putting off the moment of actually heading for the Temple, I knew. I had finally picked one and was getting ready to bargain with the owner when a voice behind me said, “Thukret’s hairy balls, those are ugly beasts.”