“M-moria-M-m-moria?”
He had never seen her like this, never seen the glamor on her. She was an uptown
lady. And he-
“0 gods, Mor-am.”
He rubbed his eyes with a grimy fist. She-found the lamp burning her hands and
set it on a bureau, taking the knife from beneath her arm. “Gods, what happened?
Where have you been?” But she needn’t ask: there was the reek of Downwind and
liquor and the bitter smell of krrf.
“I-been-lost,” he said. “I w-went-H-Her business.” He waved a hand vaguely away,
riverward, toward Downwind or nowhere at all, and squinted at her. The tic that
twisted his face did so with a vengeance. “I c-c-come back. What h-ha-hap-pened
t’ you, M-m-mo-ria? Y-y-you don’t look-“
“Makeup,” she said, “it’s makeup, uptown ladies have tricks-” She stood and
stared in horror at the kind of dirt and the kind of sight she had grown up
with, at the way Downwind twisted a man and bowed the shoulders and put
hopelessness in the eyes. “Lost. Where, lost? You could’ve sent word- you could
have sent something-” She watched the tic by Mor-am’s mouth grow violent: it was
never that way when Ischade prevented it. Ischade was not preventing it. For
some reason Ischade had stopped preventing it. “You’re in trouble with Her,
aren’t you?”
“I-t-tr-tried. I tried to do what she w-wanted. Then I-1-lost the m-m-money.”
“You mean you drank it! You gambled it, you spent it on drugs, you fool! Oh,
damn you, damn you!”
He cringed. Her tall, her once-handsome brother-he cringed down and his
shoulderblades were sharp against the rags, his dirty hands were like claws