Street Magic (4 page)

Only when she turned down a side corridor did she look back. The jade-eyed boy was following her. Where he’d come from she didn’t know, but if he thought he could track her, he was mistaken. She’d been followed in Golden House before, by people who wanted to know how she got in and out without the door guards turning her away.

Quick as a mink she darted into a deep-end gap between two empty stalls. The only things back here were two giant rolls of carpet stacked against the wall. She headed for them at a dead run, turned to pop through the gap between them, and vanished.

When she started to run, Briar tossed out a vine of his power, letting it wrap around her. She might be out of view, but he could now follow her as he liked, without spooking her. Squinting in the dim light of the back passages in Golden House, he found his vine and tracked it. It slid between two very large rolls of carpet. Only when he was right in front of them did Briar see they covered an opening in the wall of the souk, one barely visible in the shadows.

Briar shouldered through the gap and into the street outside. Looking for his vine, he found the girl. She was three blocks away, turning down a narrow side street.

Briar followed, picking up speed in the less crowded road. She led him a proper chase, around one turn and another, down the twisting ways that threaded through the city. She almost shook him near the large hammam, or bathhouse, on the Street of Tentmakers. She had vanished and Briar was squinting to see his magic in the sun’s glare when the sound of a pot shattering made him look up. She climbed a building using the iron grates over the windows as hand and foot holds, to reach the roof.

Briar followed, embarrassed that he was not as quick to climb as she, and relieved to be above the streets. Too often those narrow ways with their small windows, seamless front walls, and twists and turns made him feel trapped.

The roofs gave him an entirely different set of problems. Evvy had a good lead. Trotting along nimbly, she dodged flowerpots, drying laundry, baskets, children, women, and dogs. She leaped the short walls that divided one house from another easily, drawing farther away from Briar.

Neither realized others followed. Two male Vipers kept pace in the street below; a female Viper pursued them on the rooftops, careful to stay two houses behind Briar.

The women and children might curse Evvy for her rush across the rooftops, but they reserved their fists and attempts at capture for Briar, realizing there was something alien about him. He shook off children and dogs and ducked the women’s fists, sticks, and baskets. Even if he had walked slowly and greeted everyone, he knew they would have tried to stop him.

Evvy jumped the narrow gaps that were the streets below easily, rarely using the plank-and-rope bridges to cross. Briar gritted his teeth and did the jumps where necessary, but he wasn’t happy, and he meant to discuss his unhappiness with her at length. When he caught her.

He lost track of where they were. Working his way through a stand of grapevines, trying to talk the vines out of hanging onto him from sheer affection, Briar looked up and swore. Some way ahead loomed the orange-and-brown stone heights of Chammur Oldtown. His girl was making a beeline for the tunnels, holes, and honeycombs of dwellings in the rock cliffs within the city’s walls. She had been headed for them all along.

Oh, no, Briar thought wearily as he braced his hands on his knees and fought to catch his breath. Not Oldtown. I won’t follow her there. The arcades, halls, and tunnels that led to the apartments in the orange stone were lit by torches if they were lit at all. The smell was indescribable. The Earth dedicate who had given Briar and Rosethorn a complete tour of the city had said that parts of the heights had been inhabited for nearly twelve hundred years. As far as Briar was concerned, they smelled like it.

The thought of following a native there gave him the crawls. He ought to track down a stone mage first. He could catch the girl the next time she left Oldtown. His -

“Thief!” A basket filled with laundry slammed into his back. The grape vines fluttered with dismay. They recognized the woman who tended them and gave them water. Why was she pounding their new friend? “Murderer! Thief!” the woman cried.

“Eknub!” shrieked the woman. She thumped him with her basket even harder. “Eknub, eknub!”

She acts as if that’s worse than murder and theft, Briar thought crossly, shielding his head. And my accent must be awful. “Look,” he said, being more careful with his Chammuri, “I just want to get to the street! I’ll go, just show me - “

“The next one who asks me if folk here are friendly, I’ll send ‘em to you for a blessing!” he retorted as he swung his leg over. “The gods’ sweet day to you for your charity!”

He was a foot down when she yelled: “Whoever taught you Chammuri had the accent of a hen!”

“I’d love to travel, Rosethorn,” Briar growled as he clambered past small, grate-covered windows. “I’ll learn new languages and be insulted in them. I can ask civil questions and people will run off. Travel would be just the thing!”

The moment he set foot on the street, the woman yanked the ladder from his hold and pulled it up. Briar stuck his tongue out at her and turned to survey his location. The street looked just like every other sun-bleached residential street in Newtown.

Well, think, idiot, he told himself. The cliffs were visible over buildings to his right. If he kept them there, and started walking, he would run into the north wall.

A thock of wood overhead gave him the smallest of warnings. Reflexes he hadn’t needed in years made him leap sideways. A stream of dirty wash-water poured down where he’d just been, soaking his left arm. When he looked up, the woman he had offended gestured rudely, and walked away from the roof’s edge. For a moment Briar considered asking her grape vines to grip her and keep her prisoner until dark, but then he shook his head. There was no sense in getting the vines in trouble, too. With a sigh he searched for a street that led north as he wrung out his sleeve.

Evvy saw it all from a roof across the street, hands clapped over her mouth to hush her giggles. The jade-eyed boy had looked so much like a cat as he climbed down and as the angry woman had dumped water on him. Evvy half-expected him to shake himself off, then sit to wash himself angrily. Instead he had stalked away down the street. He didn’t even look for Evvy.

After chasing her all this way, he was just going to give up? He’d done well for an eknub on the roofs - surely he wouldn’t let an angry Chammuran and a bucket of water drive him away!

And yet it seemed he would. Evvy crept along the roofs, trailing him. He wasn’t even looking up. Why follow her all this way, just to quit?

She knew she had five davs and could perhaps get more by begging, but that wasn’t as interesting as the boy. She trailed him, trying to work out who and what he was. He’d said he was a mage. She wasn’t sure if she believed that. All the mages she’d ever known - magic-workers, healers, and hedgewitches - were adults in their mid-twenties or older, very full of themselves and whatever scraps of magic they could use. People who were younger rarely claimed the title, but he said it as casually as if it were his name.

And now that she looked him over, keeping a house behind as he walked through the streets, she could tell that his clothes were better than even Nahim’s. She sometimes made a dav or two picking rags: she knew quality tailoring when she saw it. The boy’s clothes fit as if made for him and no one else. Interestingly, the cloth didn’t wrinkle like normal clothes did. His sleeve was wet, but apart from that his garments looked as clean as if they’d just been washed. Evvy had acquired another layer of dirt on her clothes in that rooftop run, but he was still fresh. His boots were sturdy and well made. They at least carried a layer of dust from the street.

She had followed him three blocks when she saw a green-and-yellow ribbon drop onto him from a second-story window: it landed across his shoulders and curled around his neck. Evvy swallowed a gasp, thinking a serpent had dropped onto the boy from the iron-grated window. He stopped and wrapped both hands carefully around the thing, lifting it over his head.

Then Evvy got a better look and almost wished it had been a snake. The thing was a vine, the kind Chammurans called “Traveler’s Joy”; the yellow spots were its whiskered flower petals. It hung from a box under a window grate on which it grew. Unlike any plant Evvy had seen in her life, this one moved, twining and wrapping around the jade-eyed boy’s head and arms, making her think of hungry cats who know when a human has a treat for them.

She couldn’t hear what he said, but his lips moved. Finally he raised his arms toward the window-box. Slowly, chagrin in its drooping leaves and blossoms, the vine retreated to wrap around its grate once more.

Evvy rocked back on her heels. It reached for him, she thought, her mind spinning. Like it was alive. Like it had feelings!

She peered down at the street again, just as the boy turned the corner. In a flash she was up and running, following in earnest. As she did she saw rosebushes in pots lean toward him. Grapes, vines, and bean plants threw runners down from rooftops. His progress slowed; if he could not reach a plant to touch it, he stood beneath it for a moment, until it returned to its proper home. Flowers turned their faces as he passed, and grass sprouted from cracks in the street in his wake.

Always he made his way north, until he turned west on the Street of Hares. He stopped briefly to talk to a cluster of boys and girls wearing the Camelgut green sash. Whatever they said, it had to be funny, because everyone laughed. Eventually the boy walked into the house she had seen him enter the day before. Just before he went in he turned and inspected first the street, then the roofs. Evvy jerked back and down; when she looked again, he was closing the door behind him.

Evvy perched on the roof of a warehouse across the street from the eknub temple and wrapped her arms around her knees. He really was a pahan, a mage. It was the only explanation for what she had seen, though she had never heard of magic that made plants act like animals. Where had he come from, this jade-plant boy? What could he possibly want from her?

“If we grab her here, we’ll reap trouble,” argued Orlana, on a rooftop a street away. The Vipers who had followed Evvy in the street had joined her there when it became clear that the girl was settled for the time being. From their position they could see Evvy clearly. She sat without moving, her gaze intent on something below. “This quarter is full of Camelguts,” Orlana continued. “If we make a noise they’ll be on us, probably worse than they were on Sajiv yesterday.”

“We need to teach them respect,” growled Sajiv, touching his nose. The lady’s healer had fixed the damage the Camelguts had done in tearing out his gang ring, but it would be a moon before his flesh was strong enough to get another, and his nose still hurt.

The third member of their group, the black-skinned boy who had spoken first to Briar the day before, laughed contemptuously. “Why should they respect us? A year ago we were just a bunch of messengers in the Grand Bazaar, and all Chammur knows it.”

“That’s changing, Yoru,” the girl Orlana told him in a hot-voiced whisper. “The lady’s going to get us respect.”

“What a good little lapdog you are, Orlana,” replied Yoru with a sneer. “So we go from message runners to pets without never once standing on our own hind legs!”

Sajiv punched his shoulder. “If it’s so bad, why did you come today?” he wanted to know. “Maybe you’re wasting your time here, too.”

“I ain’t a fool, Sajiv,” retorted Yoru. “If it’s stones, if that kid can make the stones talk? You know how the takamers hide money staff to keep it safe.” He pointed to Evvy, who’d removed her scarf to scratch her head. “She’ll know where they’re hid. That’s real power for Vipers.”

Orlana and Sajiv traded looks of dawning wonder. Without further debate they settled down to wait Evvy out.

Briar had sensed that he had company just as the Traveler’s Joy vine got emotional enough to drop on him. The poor thing was suffering with a kind of fungus infection. Briar sent his power through every vein the Joy plant had, scorching through every hair on its roots, cooking the fungus to a fine white dust. Normally Briar had nothing against fungi, but when they preyed on other plants, he always sided with the victims.

The sense that he was followed continued after he left the vine. Peeks back down the street as he walked north showed him nothing, until he remembered the roads over the city’s roofs. He couldn’t look up without giving himself away, so he waited until he was at his own door before checking the skyline. There: quick movement back from the edge, a head scarf the nameless color of dirt, across the street. Feeling for the magic vine he’d attached to her, he found it was short and fairly thick. It was Evvy.

Well, well, Briar thought, opening his door. I made kitty curious. He considered ways to deal with her that wouldn’t scare her into running away.

A door across the street opened. One of his young neighbors knelt to place a saucer heaped with chopped meat on the ground. A gray-and-black spotted cat separated itself from the shadows at the base of the wall and trotted over to devour the food. Smiling, the girl petted the cat as it ate. Briar grinned.

Rosethorn had set the table for midday when Briar came in. She watched, startled, as he took food out of the pantry and set it on a tray: a cooked sausage, several thick slices of cheese, hardboiled eggs, cold slices of fried eggplant, and flatbread. Glancing at the table, he saw she’d been to the souk that morning. Lamb dumplings steamed in a bowl next to mutton-and-barley stew. “Can I have these?” he asked, hooking three dumplings onto his tray, then blowing on his scorched fingers. “I won’t eat any.”

Rosethorn propped her fists on her hips as he grabbed oranges from a bowl. “Boy, what in Mila’s name are you doing?” she demanded.

“Start without me,” Briar said, ignoring her question. “I’ll be right back.” He put a clean drying cloth over his shoulder and carried his tray to the roof.