The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (17 page)

Once, a pack of startled gliders!

Then amber again.

Pan Renik grew tired of screaming and sucking in poison and wondering if he was dead. Wind burned his exposed skin and stung the welts the ambassadors had raised. Could he fall forever? Were the clouds of infinite thickness?

This was an oddly pleasant afterlife; he felt moments of surprising peace, such as he had never before known.

With his shoulders he clicked the rods over his back into rigidity, extending the blanket until it was taut: he was propelled forward. Clicking the rods once more enabled him to slow forward movement. Hunching his back, first one way, then the other—forcing his elbows to bend—caused wide, slow turns.

These clouds, poison or not, were wet, almost refreshing against his face. Pan Renik spread his arms as wide as they could go, closed his eyes, and let himself soar.

Spluttering awake, path sucked in fluids, filling his lungs. As he sank, dying, light came dwindling through the milky liquid. He did not want to drown. He did not—

“Son?”

His father was shaking him; he was not immersed in liquid.

Groggily, he said, “I am a mother . . .”

But, blinking away the dream, another vision faded, joining the first to lie mingling inside him.

They were stopped by the side of the road. His father peered down at him. Others, curious, gathered around. Path shuddered. His mouth was very dry and he felt sweat trickling his forehead.

“You all right? You was flopping about. Then you went all still.”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Let’s go . . .”

The stall of artifacts was no longer at the roadside; either the business had relocated or, he thought, had never existed.

As they moved again, scents such as path had not before encountered, and residues of the vision, made him cough, feverish in the damp sling. His imagination flared with virulent but elusive images. As far as he could see, in both directions—even upward—extended the massive perimeter wall of Nowy Solum. The road they were on led over a stone bridge to huge, opened gates, through which he could now see the forms of structures. Above the top of the wall, several towers were visible, high enough to penetrate the clouds, where a stone room perched in the haze.

His stubs twitched. What would he find here?

Who he was becoming
?

Path’s father also seemed to be experiencing distress now; path felt tortured heat from the scrawny body pressed against him. Together they were a furnace.

He hissed encouragements from low in his sling as his father stumbled up the incline, toward the bridge. Here, vendors manned small grills, selling food, or blankets of products were spread out. Clearly, even to path—who had only ever been to that one wretched market before, where a handful of desert merchants had set up—the items available here were substandard: rotten things, half-eaten or broken.

He and his father had no money to purchase anything, no matter what the quality, and no things with which to trade. The only food they had was bread and a skin of water—which kept path’s belly satisfied for now, as they walked the bridge—but then what? He would not beg in this place and he did not think people would donate food, no matter what stories he might eventually tell them.

During his life in the desert—certainly before enlightenment—he had never thought much about money, nor, he knew, had his parents ever possessed any; people where he came from bartered or traded, yet as path and his father passed through this aisle of desperate commerce, not having money, or a way to get money, was clearly an oversight in the hasty plan they had made to leave home. Path sensed how people with money could live inside the city, and he sensed the hunger for it in these people at the gates, who had none. Want of money was one of the scents this close to Nowy Solum, another stench in the air.

Along the stone wall of the bridge, families lived in primitive tents or slept directly on tarps right on the wooden slats. Beggars, kneeling, averted eyes. Path saw dirty children running with their siblings. Filthy, but intact. Children with the ability to be independent. He had never seen anything like this before. These were gangly, awkward creatures: loud, their motions swift and constant. He blinked, for his eyes had grown bleary. He had to turn away when he could no longer bear the sight.

Onward his father tottered, walking a gauntlet toward the gates.

Passing below was a wide, brown river. The smell of the slow water as his father looked over the edge made path gag; it seemed to be a current of waste, bleeding sludge from the city.

From shadows inside the gates, the definition of individual structures rose over heaps of tumbled masses; he saw chimneys, roofs, sagging walls.

And people in there, throngs of people.

Cresting the bridge, path and his father passed under the stone arch, between the great doors, and into Nowy Solum.

Red-robed guards eyed them as, buffeted, his father lurched to a stop in the broad terrace.

Path saw a creature he never could have imagined: two hands high, bluish, with eyes like a woman and a laugh, when it saw him gawking, that could have broken glass. Children, faces marked in black ink, dressed in rags, scrubbed at a gutter. Beyond them, a small group of hairy beasts lingered, shifting by the mouth of an alley—

“Go on,” path said, trembling.

“But
where
?”

His father’s heart pounded so hard that path moved rhythmically in his sling.

Streets led away crookedly between buildings, like arthritic fingers from the palm of an old man’s hand. Behind them, the massive arch of dark stone, ornately carved with icons and gargoyles, loomed. Down each of these streets, crowded and noisy and terrifying, worlds of unknowable options.

As path’s father hunched over, the fabric of the sling rode up and obscured path’s view, so path shouted, “I can’t see! What are you doing?”

His father lurched, one step, two, and then they were falling. Immediately, path spilled painfully from the sling, tumbling across the cobblestones like an offering to Nowy Solum. He banged his shoulders and head, tasted blood in his mouth. He was kicked twice before he came to a stop. Looking wildly around for his father, all he saw was a patch of clouds, a leaning wall, legs.

A child with a black mark on his face peered down at him quickly, did not meet his gaze, and moved away once more.

“Help me,” he said. “Please . . .”

But the boy had gone.

Sure that he was bleeding, and that his bones were broken, path tried not to panic. What if this entire situation—the light, the visions, the knowledge that had changed him—had been a ruse to get him to this point, so he could lie, humiliated, injured on the streets of a foreign and hostile landscape?

People stepped past without so much as a glance. He might have been garbage, discarded there. He recalled what the salesman had said: one could die in the streets of the city and no one would take notice.

What had happened to his father
?

A deep voice said, “Well, well, well, what we got here?”

Without a chance to react, path was roughly hoisted by a set of huge hands and stuffed into a rough and stinky sack.

Nahid fought, which—as he’d said to Name of the Sun—was number one on his list, and so seemed inevitable. The fight was brief but left him leaking melancholy from his nose, and somewhat sobered, for the fight had been with a hemo. Nahid was pushing his luck. Being with Name of the Sun for a fortnight had changed him. Or maybe watching his sister being led away by the chatelaine had changed him. Either way, he took too many chances, pretending to lead the life of someone whose fluids were not black and thick as treacle. He looked hemos in the eye. Now he had grappled with one.

Surging through the crowds, to get away from something he suspected he could never get away from, he wondered almost hysterically when the last time was that he had skimmed the Crane or cleaned gutters. He missed his old life like a throbbing, constant pain. He had been severed in two and was afraid he might never be whole again. He wanted to gather washed-up weeds and decaying garbage from rocks of the river. He wanted to pile offal at Hot Gate, and return to the crowded ostracon.

Neither kholic nor hemo, but a creature between; he no longer belonged in Nowy Solum.

To fight on a crowded street—with a red-blooded boy—was incredibly stupid. Fortunately, the grapple had ended quickly. During it, Nahid had kept his head down, so he would not draw too much attention (but thus had sustained three stiff uppercuts). At least the pudgy boy—who had been sitting by the curbside with his pudgy girlfriend—had seemed unlike the type to file any sort of complaint with officers of the palatinate.

A comment about Nahid’s mark had made him look up, directly at the boy, who was taken aback by the transgression of this kholic returning his gaze. Then Nahid looked straight at the girlfriend’s fat face.

The boy, unable to ignore this violation, of course, yet somewhat unsure and clearly shocked, rose.

Nahid grabbed him. The boy was shorter but broader, with blond hair and an upturned nose. Nahid threw the first punch. For the hemo, this was unthinkable—attacked by a kholic! But Nahid’s punch glanced off the side of the boy’s head as he turned away, and the boy threw several wild roundhouses of his own, hitting Nahid in the chest and, finally, in the face. Only when Nahid’s nose began to slowly drip black fluids did the boy back off. Hemos were afraid of melancholy. Nahid flung congealing shapes of fluid from his throbbing hand and lurched away—

Fortunately, no palatinate had been in the area, and none of the other hemos in the vicinity tried to stop him from leaving. But surely there would be questions at the ostracon this evening, a visit by the palatinate to interrogate the senior kholic on duty.

He held his shirt up to his face, heart still pounding. At least the melancholy had stopped dripping; it clotted almost as soon as it touched the air.

With ghosts of Name of the Sun and Octavia following him, haunting him, he could only eat more buds. The alcohol had receded, but before the next wave of his high ramped up, he rested briefly on a patch of loose gravel, sitting under a downspout. Reaching out, he made a few lame attempts to remove a rotten and festering thing from the nearby curbside but ended up flinging it away when he saw the maggots beneath. He sniffed at his fingers, licked them, and rocked forward and back, hurting from head to toe.

When he glanced up, he saw the dungeon’s towers high over the rooftops. Shapes shuddered toward him, broke apart in the air. The castellan was locked up there. And, in the rooms beneath—rooms he had recently seen, but had not stepped into—dwelt his daughter, the chatelaine of Nowy Solum—

He was not a coward!

Nahid felt his mouth hanging open, dry, and he vomited suddenly, twice, into the gutter, leaving it there for one of his brothers or sisters to mop up.

He drifted past Kirk Gate and the teeming livestock markets, past the slaughter and the bleating and the flies, toward the river. He would find his way inside Jesthe again and return once he’d found his sister. The time of pranks was over. He would bring back Octavia where she belonged.

Grinding his teeth together, Nahid toyed with the buds remaining in his pocket. They were soft and damp. He passed under the overhanging homes of the Merchant Quarters, onto Red Cross Street, and from there into the city centrum.