The Infinity Concerto (4 page)

"My name," the huge, corpulent woman said, "is Lamia. Yours?" She lifted one arm and pointed a surprisingly delicate finger at him.

"Michael," he said.

"What did you bring with you?"

He held out his arms. "My clothes, I guess. The key."

"What's that in your coat pocket?"

"A book."

She nodded as best she could; her head was almost immobile on the column of her neck. The effort buried her chin in flesh. "Mr. Waltiri sent you. Where is he?"

"He's dead."

She cackled again, as if that was something ridiculous. "And so am I. Dead as this house, dead as a million dreams!" Her laughter scattered off the walls and ceilings like a flight of desperate birds. "Can you go back?"

"I don't know," he said. "I want to."

"You want to. You come here, and you want to go back. Don't you know how?"

He shook his head.

"Then you're dead, too. You're stuck here. Well, at least you have company. But you must leave this house. Nobody stays here come night."

By this time he was trembling, and angry at himself for being afraid. It was all made worse by the way the woman stared at him, saying nothing. "Well," she said finally. "You'll learn soon enough. You'll return to this house tomorrow morning."

"It's only morning now," Michael said.

"And you'll need the rest of the day to straighten out your situation. Come with me."

She walked around the staircase and opened a large door at the front of the house. He followed her shimmying form down a long flight of stone steps to a rocky field, then across a narrow path to a dirt road which wound its way through more low, treeless hills.

"There's a town - a human town - about three miles up this road, beyond the field and over a bridge. Go there quickly. Don't loiter. There are those who have no great love for humans. There's a very ramshackle hotel in town, bed and board; you'll have to work for your keep. They stick together in the town. They have to. Go there, tell them Lamia wants you put up. Tell them you'll work." She stared at the book bulging his jacket pocket. "Are you a student?" she asked.

"I guess so," he said.

"Hide the book. Full morning tomorrow, come back and we'll talk."

She turned without waiting for any reaction and labored up the steps to the door, shutting it behind her. Michael looked this way and that, trying to squeeze meaning out of the barren hills, ruined old house and rocky front yard.

It was all quite real. He wasn't dreaming.

Chapter Three

Michael had not reckoned with feeling scared, being hungry, or facing the acid realization that he had no idea what to do. He had nothing to fall back on, no reasonable guide; he had only Lamia's words. Lamia herself, whatever she had to say, was hardly reassuring. Her brusqueness and her almost certain insanity made Michael all the more desperate to find a way home. He decided to try the gate again, to climb over it if need be; perhaps the river and the countryside beyond the gate were illusory. Perhaps he could just jump and find himself back in the alley.

Back with the figure in the flounced dress and broad hat.

That thought stopped him halfway across the field, behind the ruined mansion. Fists clenched, he turned and trudged back between the dead vines and over the rocks and clods. He was on the dirt road again, following Lamia's directions, when he heard hooves pounding. A group of five horses and riders galloped along about half a mile behind him, raising a small plume of dust. He hid behind a boulder and watched.

The riders approached the narrow path leading to the house and slowed to confer with each other. Michael had never seen horses or men like them. The horses were large and lean, so tightly muscled they looked as if they had been flayed. They were a uniform mottled gray, all but one, a dazzling golden palomino.

The men were tall and thin, with a spectral quality most strikingly evident in their faces. All of them had reddish blond hair, long narrow jaws without beards and square large eyes beneath formidable brows. Their clothing was pearly gray, differing from the horses' coloration only in the way it diffracted die early morning sunlight.

Done conferring, they took the path to the house and dismounted near the steps. The horses kicked at clods of dirt as their masters entered the house without knocking.

Michael squinted from his awkward advantage. He decided it would be best for him to leave the area and get to the village as quickly as possible.

The walk took about forty-five minutes. All the way, he kept glancing over his shoulder to make sure the riders weren't coming up behind him.

His wristwatch wasn't working, he noticed; the sweep-second hand was motionless. The dial read one-sixteen. But he could judge time by his growing hunger.

The village first appeared as an irregular line of brown blocks set against the horizon. The closer he approached, the less impressed he was. The outskirts consisted of small mud-brick houses with thick thatched-straw roofs rising to conical peaks. Tiny columns of smoke crept up from most of the houses. In the still air, the smoke gradually settled into a thin, ground-hugging haze. Beyond the mud-brick houses, larger two-story buildings connected by stone walls presented a unified dreary green-brown exterior.

A low unguarded gate led through the walls into the village proper. He walked between the gateposts, kicking up wisps of moist smoke and ground fog. A sign neatly painted on the gate, arch, facing toward the village rather than out, proclaimed:

EUTERPE

Glorious Capital of the Pact Lands

A few people were about in the mid-morning, women carrying baskets and men standing and talking. They all stared at Michael as he passed. He stuck his hands firmly into his pants pockets and returned their stares with furtive glances. The women wore pants or brown, sack-like dresses. The men were dressed in dust-colored pants and dirty tan shirts. Some walked from house to house carrying bundles of dried reeds.

To Michael's discomfort, he was attracting a lot of attention, though nobody advanced to speak to him. The place had a prison's atmosphere, quiet and too orderly, with an undercurrent of tension.

He looked for a sign to show him where the hotel was. There were no signs. Finally he gathered up courage and approached a pale round-faced man with thinning black hair, who stood by a wicker crate to one side of the narrow stone-paved street.

"Excuse me," Michael said. The man regarded him with listless curiosity. "Can you tell me where the hotel is?"

The man smiled and nodded, then began speaking swiftly in a language Michael couldn't understand. Michael shook his head and the man made a few motions in the proper direction, lifting his eyebrows.

"Thanks," Michael said. Luckily, the hotel was nearby and rather obvious; it was the only place that smelled good. There was no sign in front, but the building was slightly more elegant than its neighbors, with a pretense of mud bas-relief ornament over the door and windows. The odor of baking bread poured from the first floor windows in billows. Michael paused, salivating, then walked up the front steps and entered the small lobby.

A short, bulky man wearing a gray kepi and coveralls sat behind the counter. All the furniture was made of woven wicker or - like the counter - of small close-fitting bricks. The carpets in the lobby and hall were thin and worn, and the coarse cloth upholstery on a wicker couch placed near the door was tattered, barbed with feathers and fibers.

"Lamia told me to come here," Michael said.

"Did she now?" the man asked, his gaze fixed on Michael's chest. He seemed unwilling to admit anyone was taller than he.

"You speak English," Michael said. The man agreed with a curt nod. "She said I should work for some food and be put up this evening. I should return to see her tomorrow."

"Did she now?" he repeated.

"She wants me to work."

"Ah." The man turned to look at the rack of keys mounted behind the counter - baked clay keys, bulky and silly-looking. "Lamia." He didn't sound pleased. He wrapped his fingers around a key but didn't remove it from the hook. He stared again at Michael's chest. Michael leaned over until the man could look into his face, and the man beamed a broad smile. "What kind of work?"

"I. anything, I guess."

"Lamia." He removed the key and looked at it longingly.

"She never sent anyone here before. You a friend?"

"I don't know," Michael said.

"Then why's she looking after you?" the man went on, as if Michael had answered in the negative.

"I don't know much of anything," Michael said.

"Then you're new." He stated it nonchalantly, then frowned and peered at Michael's face more closely. "By God, you're new! How'd you meet Lamia if you're new? But-" He lifted his hand and shook his head. "No questions. You are under her charge, or you wouldn't say so, believe me. Let it stand at that. Since you're new, you'll go in with the teacher." He came around the counter. "Double up. It's a small room and my wife'll work the skin off your fingers and the kink out of your arms. You'll eat plain like the rest of us." He chuckled. "There isn't anything fancy, believe me. This place is quiet at night, you'll sleep on cotton-grass, and when the alarm rings-"

At that instant, a bell clanged loudly. The sound seemed to issue from all directions. "My name," the stout man said, "is Brecker, and we'll be going downstairs now. That's the alarm. Risky!"

Michael thought he was assessing the situation, but he called out, "Risky!" again and a thin worried-looking woman about the same age as Brecker leaped down the stairs, her bandy legs taking them three at a time.

"I heard," she said. Michael looked through the lobby's smoky windows and saw people hurrying about in the streets.. "It's Wickmaster Alyons and his coursers again. They must have been at the Isomage's house, and now they're here." Michael followed them down stone steps into a dirt-walled cellar. They squatted by the wall closest to the steps, among large bottles of brown liquid and straw baskets filled with potatoes. Brecker patted the floor beside him and Michael sat.

"Why the alarm?" Michael asked.

Risky tossed her lank hair and spat into a corner. "The riding of the noble Sidhe against the race of man," she said, her voice thick with sarcasm. She appraised Michael with a cool eye. "You're new," she said. "Where's Savarin?"

"Probably watching them from upstairs," Brecker said. "As usual."

'Even with the cellar door shut, Michael heard the sharp clatter of hooves. There was a high-pitched keening, and then a voice resonant and hypnotic.

"Hoy ac! Meat-eaters, followers of the Serpent! Praise Adonna, or we unleash your babes and return the Pact Lands to dust and desert!"

Breaker shuddered and Risky's lips became thin and white. The hooves clattered off, and moments later bells rang again throughout the town.

"Welcome to Euterpe," Risky said to Michael as she threw open the cellar door and scrambled up the steps. Brecker followed, motioning for Michael to return with them to the first floor.

"Tomorrow," Brecker told Risky, "our new lodger goes back to the Isomage's house, to Lamia. He's new, you know."

"He's much too young to be anything else," Risky said. "And he's not like the rest of us. Not if she wants him." That said, she seemed to make an effort to put everything from her mind. "Show him the double."

"My thought, too. With Savarin."

"Might as well. There's a lot for him to learn."

The double on the second floor was at the end of an ill-lit corridor. The room was small, paneled in thin strips of gray pasteboard. The floor was tiled with mica and flaked under his shoes. There were two beds in the narrow space, stacked bunk-style, and a washbasin on a flimsy stand made of sticks and wicker. At least there were no insects he could see.

As he stood in the doorway, wondering who Savarin was, Risky came up behind him and argued with Brecker over what work he was to do. Brecker gave Michael a nervous glance and took Risky down the corridor, where they whispered.

Michael caught most of the conversation despite their precautions.

"If he's under Lamia's protection, should we work him at all?" Brecker asked.

"Did she forbid it? I say, work him. We can always use hands."

"Yes, but he's different from the rest of us-"

"Only because he came from the Isomage's house."

"And shouldn't that mean something?"

"Lamia doesn't scare me," Risky said. "Now, if Alyons brought him in under his arm and said, 'Show him a good time,' maybe then we'd spare him some labor."

That seemed to settle it. Risky showed him the washroom-"Modern, one upstairs and one down," she said, but no running water and no plumbing - and took him upstairs. He began by wringing fresh-washed linens through stone mangle in a laundry room behind the kitchen. As he turned the handle and fed in sheets and pillow casings, he munched on a piece of bread.

"No crumbs on the sheets," Risky told him, handing him a glass of thin milk. "You look hungry."

"Starved," Michael said.

"Well, don't eat too much. We'll just take it out in more work."

Carrying dried sheets upstairs, Michael noticed that only two rooms were occupied out of the twelve in the building; the double he shared with the unknown Savarin, and the largest, a suite. "We don't go in the suite but once a week," Risky explained.

"Who's in it?"

"Hungry and curious. Hungry and curious. Takes new ones a while to learn how the land lies, doesn't it?" She shook her head. "You'll meet him this evening. Brecker's already planning a gathering."

In the hotel's service court, he was put to chopping sticks - or rather making the attempt. He raised blisters quickly on both hands and felt miserable. He had never enjoyed hard physical labor. As he swung and missed, swung and missed, swung and splintered, swung and finally split a bundle of sticks cleanly, he wanted more than anything to be home again, in bed with a book on his lap and a ginger ale on his nightstand.

By dusk - which came somewhat early, he thought - he had cut thirteen bundles of sticks into sizes that would fit in the hotel stove. Brecker inspected the small pile and shook his head. He stared at Michael's chest as he said, "No doubt you'll do better later. If you get to stay here. But never mind. There's the meeting tonight." His face took on a contented expression and he winked. "Word gets around. You're good for the business, tonight at least."