“Cheonea? Where’s that? Never heard of it.”
“A way west of here. A month by ship, if it’s moderately fast. On the far side of Phras.” Jaril sipped at the brandy. “Almost an island. Shaped like a hand with a thready wrist. We were there a year ago. Didn’t stay long, one city the usual sort of seaport, farms and mountains and a smuggler’s haven. Not very interesting. They kicked their king out a few decades back, from what I heard, he was no loss, but they got landed with a Sorceror who seems to think he’s got the answer to the riddle of life.” He reached for the bronze piece, tossed it to Brann. “Take a good look at that.”
She caught it with her free hand. “Why not just tell me…” She set the tea bowl down, began examining the triangle. Temueng script. On one side part of the Emperor’s sigil, on the other part of a name. “… ra Hazani. The boy said something, um, let me remember… Harra… no, we the blood of Harra Hazani say to you, remember what you swore. This is half of one of those credeens the Maratullik struck off for Taguiloa and the rest of us. You remember those?”
Jaril grimaced. “We should.”
Brann rubbed her thumb over the bronze. “I know.” She’d had a choice then, Slya’s sly malice set it for her, she could protect Taguiloa and the other players or send the changechildren home. She chose the players because they were the most vulnerable and accepted responsibility for keeping the children fed, though she hadn’t really realized what that meant. Her own bronze credeen was around somewhere, likely at the bottom of the chest with the rest of her old clothes. “What’s the letter say?”
Yaril lifted the parchment. “Took us a while to decipher it, we didn’t pay that much attention to the written language when we were there. So, a lot of this is guess and twist till it seems to fit. We think it’s a young girl writing, there are some squiggles after her name that might be determinatives expressing age and sex. She seems to be called Kori Piyolss of Owlyn Vale. She calls on the Drinker of Souls to remember her promise, that she’d come from the ends of the earth to help the Children of Harra. Harra married Kori’s great great etc. grandfather and passed the promise on. Kori says she wouldn’t use Harra’s gift on anything unimportant, that you, Brann, must believe that. Someone close and dear to her faces a horrible death, everyone in the Vale lives in fear of He who sits in the Citadel of Silagamatys. That’s the city Jaril was talking about, the only settlement in Cheonea big enough to call a city, a port on the south coast. She asks you to meet her there on the seventeenth day of Theriste. Mmm. That’s thirty-seven days from now, no from yesterday, it’s almost dawn, um, if I remember their dating system correctly. Meet her in a tavern called the Blue Seamaid. She’ll be along after dark and she’ll have the rest of the credeen. She can’t write more about her plans in case this letter falls into the hands of Him. Got a heavy slash of ink under that him. You made the promise, Brann.” She grinned. “And very drunk out it was. You remember, the party Taguiloa threw for the whole quarter when we got back from Andurya Durat.” She pushed ash blond hair off her face. “Going to keep it?”
“Doesn’t seem I have much choice. That sorceror, what’s his name?”
“Settsimaksimin.”
“Right now he probably thinks I’m dead. That won’t last long.” She sipped at her tea, sighed. “And there’s another thing. I’ve put off thinking about it, but those tigermen cut through more than my flesh. I’ve stayed here about as long as I can. Much more and folk are going to start asking awkward questions about just what I am.” She looked round the room, eyes lingering on surfaces and cooking things her hands had held, scrubbed, polished, shook, brushed against for the past hundred years; it was an extension of her body and leaving it behind would be like lopping off an arm.
Eyes laughing at her, Jaril said, “You could turn into a local haunt, remember the old man on the mountain across the bay from Silili?”
“Hunh. And what would you be, Jay, a haunt’s haunt?” She smiled, shook her head. “It might come to that, but I’m not ready for godhood yet, even demigodhood.”
“What about this place?”
“Have to leave it, I suppose. Put the things I want to keep in the secret cellar you and Yaril burnt out for me, leave the rest to the wind and thieves.” She yawned, finished her tea, rubbed her thumb against the bowl. It was part of the Das’n Vuor set that was one of the last things her father made before the Temuengs took him and the rest of Arth Slya to work in the pens of the Emperor. “Mmmm. Either of you see a riverboat heading west when you flew in?”
“There was one leaving Gofajiu, you know what that means, it’ll be here two or three days on. You really planning on flagging it?”
Brann’s mouth twitched to a half smile. “Yes no; Jay, I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She smoothed the teabowl along a wrist little more than bone and taut skin, half what it’d been a day ago. “I don’t look much like I did the past some years.” Chuckle. “Young. And bald. That’s not the Potter. Couldn’t be the Potter. On the other hand,” she grimaced, “that’s the Potter’s landing, what’s she doing there, that woman, who is she, where’s the Potter? Riverboat’s comfortable and safe as you can get on the river, the two of you aren’t up to much, me either.” She set the bowl on the table and slumped in the chair gazing into the mirrorblack of the pot, her image distorted by the accidents of texture that gave the surface half its beauty. “I don’t know… I know I’d rather take the riverboat but…” She sighed. “The river’s low, the summer’s been hot and dry, it’s still a monster, I’ve never sailed the skiff that far, but… Ah, Slya’s teeth, I keep thinking, the Potter’s dead, leave her dead, no loose ends like strange females hanging about. My father always said the hard way’s the best way, it means you’re thinking about what you’re doing not just drifting with no idea where you’re going.” A long tired sigh. “We’ll forget the riverboat and take the clay skiff and hope old Tungjii’s watching out for us.” She sat up. “I’m too tired to work and too itchy to sleep. Probably shouldn’t have drunk that tea. Ah well, we can’t leave tomorrow anyway, too much to do.” She yawned, then poured herself another bowl. “So. Tell me more about Cheonea. When you were there did you happen to visit Owlyn Vale?”
Brann slid into the harbor at Jade Halimm after sundown on the third day, threading through a torchlit maze of floating life-flowerboats with their reigning courtesans and less expensive dancers, horizontal and otherwise, gambling boats, hawkers of every luxury and perversion the foreign traders and seaman might desire, scaled to the size of their purses. The wealthier passengers were left untroubled; they’d find their pleasures in more elegant surroundings ashore. The Jade King’s mosquito boats buzzed about to make sure these last were not troubled by offers that might offend their sensibilities. Too shabby to attract the attention of the hawkers or the mosquito patrol, too busy managing the skiff to notice much of this, Brann got through the water throng without accident or incident and tied up at a singhouse pier, the small old skiff lost among the other boats. The tide was on the turn, beginning to come in, but it was still a long climb to the pier, half of it on a ladder slimy with seamoss and decaying weed and the exudates of the lingam slugs that fed on them and the weesha snails that lived in them. She wiped her hands on her trousers when she reached dry wood, not appreciably worsening the mess they were already.
She stood on the edge of the pier looking down at the boat, feeling gently melancholy. It was the last thing left of her life as the Potter of Shaynamoshu. She stood there, the harbor raucous about her, remembering… a slant of light through autumn leaves, the sharp smell of life ripened to the verge of decay, the last firing that year, what year was it, no she couldn’t place it now, it was just a year, nothing but a collection of images and smells and a deep abiding sense of joy that came she didn’t know why or from where, coming down the track with the handcart loaded, the children playing in otter-shape running and tumbling before her… another time, the firing Tungjii blessed, texture moving in sacred dance over the surface, color within color, like an opal but more restrained, subtle earth hues, and most of all the feel of it, the weight and balance of it in the hollow of her hand when she almost knew the triumph her father felt when he took the last of the Das’n Vuor drinking bowls from the kiln on Tincreal and knew that three of them were perfect… another time after a snowfall when the earth was white and the sky was white and the silence whiter than both.