A room at the Dolphin’s Teeth. Three walls washed dark red and one lavender. Lamps in cages of leaded lavender glass hung up among bronze cages of tweeting pink and white birds, the whole ceiling a riot of light-flicker and birdflicker. A Masrian fireplace, the length of the second red wall-an odd affair, since worship of Masrimas means a naked flame must not be seen to burn. The faggots were invisibly lighted behind an intricate lattice of iron, which presently altered to the color of the fire, and glowed with a snapping, venomous heat through the cool city nights of early summer. In the lavender wall was a single large window with a parchment blind to let down, thereby turning the room purple. Outside, the view of a small court, orange trees, and a marble basin containing striped fish.
In this location I sat, and gave myself over to the modish appearance of the city. Aristocrat, merchant, bandit, all looked much the same, providing they could afford it. For it was an expensive thing to be in the mode.
They chop off the hair at the shoulder and the beard close to the jaw, and curl what remains with reedlike tongs. For the bath, they show you forty essences and recommend forty others they do not have on them. Three tailors come with garments readymade and cloths uncut, and spit and bicker between themselves, and the jeweler slinks up and produces a silver collar, two hands broad and with lion epaulets, which you have reason to suspect has been recently around the neck of some pirate-prince just now sent to be measured for a piece of rope instead.
At length the noon meal is brought in, and you discover platters full of gilded stewed seafood with raisin stones among quinces, and miniature joints that turn out to be baked shrews and their gods-know-what besides, and tall thimbles of black koois, the rum of the south. Everything, in short, that such luxury-loving sharks as Charpon might desire.
These novelties so far came as a flamboyant credit, extended to each of Charpon’s officers. Where I was to pay in cash, I borrowed from Kochus, who accepted every fresh excursion into his coffers as insurance against my wrath.
In the early afternoon Charpon presented himself, having turned meantime into as much of a dandy as I had, and with his cropped pate covered by a wig of blue-black curls.
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“I hear you’re sending my men on your business, sir,” he said. He looked me over, taking in the New World elegance, “And spending freely on my credit.”
“Lord Vazkor has been using my money, Charpon,” cried Kochus, anxious to show loyalty to both his dangerous superiors.
“Charpon,” I said, “if you wish to dissociate yourself from me, get out.”
“You are aware, sir, that I am as much your slave as any of my Hessek rabble. I am only surprised, after your treatment at my hands, that you let me live.”
“I have no wish to kill a man without cause,” I said. Through his eyes I saw pass, under the layer of caution and unstruggling surrender, the contempt for my supposed ethics and my lack of years, which even my sorcery had not cured him of.
I had had sixteen days as the Vineyard sailed and I lived gratis in Charpon’s ship-house-sixteen days to formulate my plans. Which were simple enough. If my bitch-dam was here in the south, as my sense of precognition led me to believe, I would need funds and cunning to seek her. For sure she had hidden herself. Talk with the sailors had not revealed any notion of her; clearly she had not elevated herself to a position of influence, as in Ezlann when she was my father’s wife. Supposing her here, she might even have lost herself hi some backwater of Bar-Ibithni itself. It seemed to me one way to flush her out was to make a stir, in my father’s name. I meant to become the sorcerer and healer Vazkor, and I meant to amass some wealth, too, putting my alarming gifts to work for me. With sufficient reputation and coin, my investigations could be facile. If she fled, or if I failed to come on her, I must simply cast the net more widely.
2
Charpon dismissed, I went out into the dove-wing heat of the city, which in late summer would swelter into a furnace. The Amber Road continues from the Market of the World along the western side of Hragon’s Wall, that bastion which
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divides the aristocratic portion of the metropolis from the vulgar.
Bar-Ibithni was four cities. Its hub was the vast commercial area of port, docks, and markets, which clambered into suburbs across the uplands in the south. Beyond Hragon’s inner wall lay the fortified citadel on a natural hill called the Pillar, a military edifice situated within two square miles of bronze-faced outer battlements, and capable of accommodating seventeen jerds, somewhere in the region of seventeen thousand men. Away from the Pillar, to the east, stretched the Palm Quarter, its terraces of gargantuan temples and lotus mansions culminating in the Heavenly City, inaccessible to most-the Emperor’s stronghold.
Meantime, beyond a tract of marsh far to the west, where it had formed like a scum around the ancient and abandoned docks, was all that remained of Old Hessek Bit-Hessee (popularly known as the Rat-Hole), a warren of slums worse than any that clotted the outskirts of the New Capital. Half underground, frequently fever-ridden, dark as dusk at noon and pitch-black by night, no man, warrior, or imbecile visited there unless it would cost his life to stay away.
Amber Road ended near Winged Horse Gate, the main entrance through Hragon’s Wall to the Palm Quarter. Here, on the west side of the wall, the fashionable part of the commercial area began, squares with fountains and stucco houses with painted columns, and the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias. To the Grove those with the time to idle come at this hour of the day, to parade up and down the smooth lawns, and breathe in the perfume of dusty, full-blown magnolia blossom, while conjurers performed tricks and caged beasts roared in arbors.
As Kochus and I, with the usual precautionary band of accompanying roughnecks, strolled up the street to the Grove, Lyo sprang out on us from a shadow.
“Lord Vazkor,” he said urgently to me, speaking in his own Seemase tongue, which only I could entirely follow, “there shall be three.”
While I had lounged in the hostelry, Charpon’s Hesseks had been about the town, on my orders, to spread word of the sorcerer. (My dealings with Gold-Arm the pirate had probably found their own voice) Lyo, however, I had sent with a man who knew the undercurrents of Bar-Ibithni, to inquire after those sick in need of an extravagant cure.
“Three,” I said. “Good.”
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He grinned; he had been running around on my errandSj pleased with the sound chest he now had.
“It’s to be this way, Lauw-yess. An old woman will approach you on the second lawn, selling sweets from a tray. She will stumble and fall in your path, crying out loudly so everyone can hear. She is well known and has a crippled spine, though she panders to it in order to win sympathy.”
“Will she, then, not object to being healed?”
“Ah no, Lauw-yess. She says if you are magician enough to do it, she will be able to exhibit herself as your handiwork, and get more coins than ever. She asks”-he grinned again-“if you could not make her young again, too.”
“And how much did she cost us?”
He pursed his mouth.
“My apologies, Kochus,” I said. “Tell me the rest, Lyo.”
“Once you have worked the miracle for her, another will come, a young man known to be blind in both eyes-he is the youngest son of the merchant Kecham, but his father cast him off when he would go live with a strumpet, and now the strumpet is the only one who cares for him. She will bring him on the cue, but she is worse than the old sweet-seller, wanted three pieces of silver for it, for she lacks faith. She will see. When that is done and the boy’s eyes healed, Lauwyess, the crowd should be primed. But to be sure, I have passed the word among the gate porters of Phoonlin’s house-he is rich, half-Marsian, and superstitious, and his wife gossips with the maids and is more superstitious even than he. He has a rock near his bladder that is nearly killing him with the pain. He has called on priest-healers before, of the Masrian temples, and of the Old Faith, too, so I hear. If he knows there is a magician in the Magnolia Grove, he will go to discover. Then, after a wonder or two, he will throw himself down before you and beg.”
“You did well,” I said. My other errand boy had by now come up, and Kochus paid them both without demur. We crossed Winged Horse Square and went through the old wall of the Grove, which had been a Hessek garden a hundredodd years earlier.