Neveryona (14 page)

There, at any rate, activity seemed almost as great as it had earlier. The loiterers’ faces were mostly new, but their colorful, ragged clothes, their curious painted eyes were the same. Walking, she tried not to show nervousness or hurt, to find the effort moved her along more quickly when she wanted to look leisurely, made her look away when a painted eye glanced.

When the ringed hand grabbed her shoulder, Pryn caught her breath, turning, tried to push away –

‘Well, you’re back!’ With their bright freight, the dirty fingers held. The other hand – as dirty, but ringless – grappled Pryn’s hair. ‘So you found he didn’t want you after all. Anyone here could have told you that! Don’t fight me, girl, or I’ll break your teeth with one smack and your eardrum with another – and
still
make you work the bridge for me!’ Over his naked chest, she saw for the first time many little cuts, small scars, scratches …

She hit at him, because she was angry again – and did not hit as hard as she might, because she was surprised and sore and, yes, exhausted. He jerked her hair. Handsome features slid about on one another with the effort. She blinked to see his hand falling to slap her. Over his shoulder, onlookers moved away as others stepped up.

Then something happened.

Sliding features locked.

The hand halted, inches from Pryn’s flinching jaw.

A muscle quivered in his cheek. An eyelid twitched, lowered … His mouth, half open, began a creaking noise like an old hinge, or maybe someone trying to suck air through a constricted throat.

Fingers in her hair loosened.

Pryn jerked her head away.

Nynx began to sag; and Pryn saw, behind him, gray eyes below a thatch of cream-yellow.

Nynx fell, his hand pulling from Pryn’s other shoulder, where it had momentarily and limply caught, to flop on the bridge, soiled fingers opening as if stone and metal were too heavy to hold in a fist.

Pryn looked at the blade the pale-haired woman gripped.

‘Stupid …’ the young woman said, a little hoarsely.

Pryn blinked.

‘… dead,’ the woman added. ‘Yes.’ She grimaced. ‘All right. Come with me.’

Pryn was about to protest. But the woman barked at the onlookers, ‘Why are you gawking? It’s only a corpse! There’re six more like it, rotting in the river. Just throw this one on top!’ She gave a high, breathy laugh and took Pryn’s upper arm in her very strong fingers. ‘Let’s go, I said.’ Pryn went, because – well, she was frightened and also because she had gone rather numb. If my rescuer had been a black-haired woman with a rag mask and a double–bladed sword, Pryn thought as they left the bridge and crossed to an alley’s narrow entrance, I
wouldn’t
protest … The gaunt, pale-haired murderess – but hadn’t Pryn also murdered less than an hour back? – was not more than three years older than Pryn, for all her sunken eyes and tightly muscled frame. As one murderess led the other around another cistern, Pryn managed to ask, ‘What … what do you want?’

‘To take you to my mistress.’ The fingers stayed painfully tight, ‘I waited for you three hours – though I thought I’d get to you before you got yourself in trouble with someone like that!’

‘Waiting for me …?’ Pryn tried to work her arm free; the grip hurt, and her side was still sore. ‘There? But why there …?’

‘Same reason as that bridge louse.’ The high, hoarse laugh, ‘I knew you’d be along the same way he did. You’re an ignorant mountain girl in this strange and terrible city – where else could you have come?’

Pryn started to say that she
did
know writing – a good bit of it, too. But the blond-white murderess released her arm and gave her a little push ahead to hurry her. ‘Please, ‘Pryn said. ‘Please, can’t you tell me where you’re taking me?’

‘I told you. To my mistress. She has taken an interest in you. She wants to further your career.’

The little woman was ahead of Pryn again, loping off down an even darker alley. There was nothing for Pryn to do but follow. ‘Who
is
your mistress?’ Pryn asked. ‘What does she do? What does she want me for?’ She tried to remember the people who had been with this strange creature when the Fox’s horse had almost run into them on the street that morning.

‘My mistress is a merchant woman – very clever. Very powerful. She likes to amass wealth and influence events – does a lot of both.’ The young woman put the point of her knife, which she had not re-sheathed, into her mouth to pick at something between her teeth. That she had not wiped the blade since the stabbing was, suddenly for Pryn amidst all the day’s violence, the
most
coldly perverse thing she’d seen.

‘And you …?’ Pryn asked. Chills cascaded her back, made the skin of her thighs pull in. If it was fear, she’d never felt this particular sort before. She had no idea what to do with it; so she tried to go on as though she weren’t feeling anything. ‘Who are
you
? What do
you
do …?’

The alley opened out. A covered cart with a single horse stood in the shadow of an arch.

‘Me?’ The woman took down the horse’s reins. ‘My mistress calls me the Wild Ini. Her secretary calls me the Silver Viper. (
Her
name is Radiant Jade, but that’s because she’s a barbarian!) You’ll probably find your own name for me – if we know each other long enough. What do ‘I do?’ The breathy laugh. ‘I do what I like. And I like to kill people. A lot!’ Then she pushed Pryn up the short ladder at the cart’s side, while Pryn, with aching flank and bruised arm, reached for balance into the darkness among the cart’s maroon hangings.

Psychoanalysis tells us that fantasy is a fiction, and that consciousness itself is a fantasy-effect. In the same way, literature tells us that authority is a
language effect
, the product of the creation of its own
rhetorical
power: that authority is the
power of fiction
; that authority, therefore, is likewise a fiction.

– S
HOSHANA
F
ELMAN
To Open the Question

‘Dawn is the loveliest time in this garden,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘One would think that these blue dahlias, that those black tulips had been set in the shadow of this high rock or banked beside that grotesque stone beast to catch the precise subtlety of this light and no other. Will you walk with me up this path?’

‘I’m very confused, Madame Keyne,’ Pryn said. ‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘No doubt you are also frightened. The Wild Ini can be very frightening if seen in the proper light. But she is useful. She tells me she pulled you from the arms of a street pander – put a knife in him, too! You do not look like a woman used to such violences. Certainly you must have been terrified!’

Pryn thought of her dragon, of her own killings, of the carnage in the cellar. The pale–haired woman’s blade (whose thrust into Nynx Pryn had not even seen) had, if anything, brought the mayhem to a close; and because Pryn had not seen the thrust, it had also seemed a closing that was, somehow, external to the mayhem rather than of it. ‘Madame, I was – and am – more confused than frightened.’

‘Ah?’ Madame Keyne’s blue skirts floated back in the light breeze from more sheer blue. (Pryn remembered the thick cloth from her aunt’s loom.) ‘Well, I understand. Such violence engulfs the person caught up in it the way air supports a bird or water suspends a fish: one moves through it; it contours one’s every move. Yet one hardly realizes it’s there. I understand your state, believe me. A young woman of your sensibilities, brought to a strange house in a strange, if beautiful, suburb of the city, ministered to by unknown servants, made to sleep in a strange bed, unsure of who might enter during the long night, while the violences of the day vanish simply through incomprehension – surely this calm and alien domesticity has produced in you the real terror?’

‘Was that big woman who took my clothes and gave me a bath last night a servant?’ Pryn asked. ‘I’ve heard of servants, but I’ve never really seen one – up close.’ Pryn looked down at the new dress she had been given. Her side was much less sore this morning, but she knew that beneath the green material was a wide, purplish bruise. ‘Before she turned down my bed and told me to sleep, she said I had nothing to be afraid of.’ Recalling the nights she had slept beside the road in the forests and the fields, Pryn wondered how to explain the half-sleep that had become natural to her. ‘It was easier to believe her – and sleep – than to doubt and lie awake till morning. Again, Madame, I was not so much frightened as confused.’

Madame Keyne sighed. ‘My entire life I have found things seldom to be as most people expect them, and I have grown wealthy catering to people’s expectations by my manipulations of the real. Yet my own expectations are as hard for me to let go as the superstitions of some barbarian living in ignorance and squalor in the Spur. I expect you to be terrified, and, quite mechanically,
against all your protests I have done everything to alleviate that terror. Even accepting your protest is, for me, a matter of assuming my efforts have been successful – rather than admitting there was no need for my concern.’ She smiled at Pryn with an almost elderly irony. ‘So. You are no
longer
terrified. Very good. Perhaps we both can accept that. Such a marvelous morning!’ Madame Keyne’s white hair was coiled about her head on silver combs. Her dark skin, here smooth at cheek and forearm, there wrinkled at wrist and neck, glowed like noon. ‘Acceptance is
so
simple! I walk in my garden, here, at dawn, to find simplicity. Look around you – at the rising paths, the falling waters, the protective walls ranged about us, the tiled mosaics decorating my home, the large statues there, the little ones over here. For me, that
is
simplicity. And for you, it’s confusion.’

They were walking up a path paved with red brick – the same brick, Pryn saw, that had covered the market place. Here, however, moss reached across it from the path’s edge or lapped out from carefully tended flower banks and sapling groves.

They gained a rise.

Beyond the garden wall, Pryn could make out another house, a house about whose upper stories much tiling had fallen away. A dozen men, some with spears, all with leather helmets, ambled the roof behind cracked crenellations.

‘Really, you know, I am the despair of my gardeners.’ Madame Keyne pushed her bracelets up her wrist – most of which fell jangling again. ‘One would think, by custom, this is the time they would be up, preparing the grounds for the later risers. But I have demanded Clyton keep the place free for this first hour after sunrise so that I might come and walk. But I notice your gaze has strayed to my neighbor’s lawns – if one can call them that. The garden
there is no longer tended at all. His soldiers stamp along the balustrades. Now and again someone rides up to shout an incomprehensible message, and someone rides away …’

‘Do you know,’ Pryn began, ‘your … your neighbor?’

‘
Know
him? He’s no acquaintance of mine! That isn’t even Sallese – over the wall is Neveryóna, the old neighborhood of Kolhari. Look how it’s falling to pieces! That’s what inherited wealth leads to, I tell you. Though he certainly didn’t inherit
his
! Well, it’s not surprising he would take over some ramshackle mansion
there
! Know him? Know this Liberator all the city talks of? I’m terrified of him! He rented that old run-down shell of a house six weeks ago. Everyone who borders on it thought he would soon have workers and artisans repairing, refacing, bringing that once-beautiful property back to a state we could all admire. But as you can see, he keeps his headquarters no better than a barracks. And within those littered halls and peeling chambers sits our Liberator – planning and plotting liberation, no doubt. It’s quite unsetttling. You spoke of servants? Six weeks ago, there were three times as many of them working here as there are today –
he’s
scared them off! Myself, I think they’ve gone to join him, those that haven’t simply fled. And you can be sure it’s not
my
liberation he’s planning! Terrifying, yes. If that’s the way he treats his own house, what may he eventually do to mine?’ Madame Keyne shook her head and took Pryn’s arm – very gently – to lead her around a stone hut that had broken from the bushes at the top of the rise. Had Pryn been more used to gardens of such extent, she would have assumed it a storage shack for tools. As she wasn’t, however, she wondered who might live in the little enclosure, for it had no windows – only some grilles set high in the walls. The recessed door was hewn of thick
plank. The hedges and trees around it were arranged to hide it from you completely while you were not actually on its circling path. The stone bench at the hut’s back, however, offered an extraordinary view. ‘Come, sit with me.’ The bench itself was a sculpted replica of one of the split log seats Pryn had seen in the inner city. Madame Keyne sat, patting the stone beside her. ‘That’s right. Right here. From where we are, the Liberator and his ugly home are comfortably out of sight – though, like so many such phenomena, once they have been put behind, they tend to pervade all that lies before. You can see almost the entire city from here. I had this bench set so one could sit and contemplate Kolhari, for there is no prospect opening upon it quite so impressive, at least from within city limits. There, of course, is the High Court of Eagles. That break among the buildings is the Old Market, just across the Bridge of Lost Desire, where you were last night. The trees there mark the Empress’s newly designated public park; only a street away, in that open space between the buildings lies the New Market – the Old Market in the Spur, I fear, has become merely a quaint and archaic metaphor for commerce, whereas really to know the life and pulse of this city, one must lose and make a fortune or two in the New Market – don’t you think?’