The onshore wind tugged at her sleeves, sent the ends of her headscarf whipping beside her ear. She thrust a finger under the scarf, felt the quarter inch of stubble. Growing fast, Slya bless. She settled the scarf more firmly, clicked her tongue with impatience as a horned owl swooped low over her head and screeched at her. “I know,” she muttered, “I know. It’s time to get settled.”
She found a room in a run down tavern near the West-wall, a cubicle with a bed and not much else, blankets thin and greasy, bedbugs and fleas, a stink that was the work of decades, stain on stain on stain never insulted by the touch of soap; its only amenities were a stout bar on the door and a grill over the slit of a window, but these were worth the premium price she paid for sole occupancy. Her base established, she found a lateopen tailor and ordered new clothing, found one of her favorite cookshops and ate standing up, watching the life of the Harbor Quarter teem around her.
The next six days she prowled the night, in and out of houses, winding through back alleys, following the stench of corroded souls, killing until her own soul revolted, drinking the life of her victims, feeding the children, renewing her own vigor, drinking life until her flesh gave off a glow like moonlight. As the children edged in their slow way toward maturity, their capacity to store energy increased. Now they needed recharging only every second year, but it took many nights of hunting to fill their reserves. Back when Slya forced the choice on her she hadn’t realized the full implications of her decision. She was, despite her appearance and the compressed experience of the past months, only twelve years old when that decision was made; she hadn’t known how weary she could get of living (admittedly not every day, many of her days were contented, even joyful, but the dark times came more often as the decades passed), she hadn’t known how crushing the burden of feeding the children would become, she hadn’t known how much their appetite would increase, how many lives it would take to sate their hunger, how loathsome she would look to herself no matter how careful she was to choose badlives. Kings and mercenaries, counselors and generals, muggers, pimps and assassins, all such folk, they seemed able to live contentedly enough though they killed and maimed and tortured with exuberance and extravagance, but at the end of her bouts, of gorging, she was so prostrated and self-disgusted that she wondered how she could bring herself to do it again; yet when the children were hungry once more, she found the will to hunt; they began as innocent victims of a god-battle they hadn’t asked to join and finished as victims of her confusion and her preference for her own kind; to let them starve would be a greater wrong than all the killing lumped together.
On the seventh evening when her prowling was done for a while and her new clothes had been delivered, she moved from the tavern to a better room in, a better Inn in a better neighborhood, close to the wall that circled the highmerchant’s quarter, a four-story structure with a bathhouse and a pocket garden for eating in when the days were sunny and the evenings clear.
Brann gave a handful of coppers to the youth who carried her gear and showed her to the room she’d hired for the next three nights; she watched him out, then crossed to the single window and opened the shutters. “Hunh, not much of a view.”
Jaril ambled over and leaned heavily against her. “Nice wall.”
Yaril squeezed past them and put her head out as far as she could; she looked up and around, wriggled free and went to sit on the bed. “Should be bars on the windows. Bramble, our Host down there obviously didn’t think much of you, putting you in this room. Should we leave the shutters open to catch a bit of air, anyone could get in here. The top of that wall is just about even with the top of the window and it’s only six feet off, if that.”
Brann smiled. “Pity the poor thief who breaks in here.” She left the window, prodded at the bed. “Better than the rack in that other place. My bones ache thinking about it. Uuuh, I’m tired. Too tired to eat. I think I’ll skip supper and spend an hour or so in the bathhouse. Yaro, Jay, I’d appreciate it if one of you gave the mattress a runthrough before you bank your fires, make sure we’ve got no vermin sharing the room with us. I can’t answer for my temper if I wake itching.”
Unlike Hina Baths, the House was divided, one side for women, the other for men and the division was rigidly maintained. The attendant on the women’s side (a female wrestler who looked more than capable of thumping anyone, male or female, who tried to make trouble) didn’t quite know what to make of Brann; she wasn’t accustomed to persons claiming to be females who wore what she considered male attire. Half annoyed, half amused, too tired to argue, Brann snorted with disgust, stripped off her shirt and trousers. Demonstrably female, she strolled inside.
The water was steamy, herb scented, filled with small bubbles as it splashed into a sunken pool made of worn stones, gray with touches of amber and russet and chalky blue. Nubbly white towels were piled on a wicker table near the door into the chamber, there were hooks set into the wall for the patron’s clothing, a shallow saucer of soap and a dish of scented oil sat beside the pool beneath a rail of smooth white porcelain, scrubbing cloths were draped over the rail. Brann hung up her shirt and trousers, dropped her underclothing beside the towels, tugged, off her boots and put them on a boot-stand beside the table. Stretching, yawning, the heat seeping into muscle and bone, she ambled to the pool and slid into water hot enough to make her bite on her lip and shudder with pleasure when she was immersed. She clung to the rail for a moment, then began swimming about, brushing through the uncurling leaves of the dried herbs the attendant had dropped into the water as she opened the taps that let it flow from the hot cistern. She ducked her head under, shook it, feeling the half-inch of new hair move against her skull. Surfacing, she pulled herself onto the edge of the pool and began soaping her legs, taking pleasure in her body for the first time in years; she’d lived a deliberately muffled life up on her mountain, centering her pleasures in her work and the landscape around her; a longtime lover could have learned too much about her, there was no one she trusted that much, no one she wanted enough to chance his revulsion when he learned what she was; even a short-timer would have made too many complications. Now, she was a skinful of energy, tingling with want, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it. Cultures change in a hundred years; the changes might not be large but they were enough to tangle her feet if she didn’t move with care. Laughing uncertainly as her nipples tautened and a dagger of pleasurable need stabbed up from her groin, she pulled a scrub cloth across her breasts, watched the scented lather slide over them, then flung the cloth away and plunged into the pool, submerging, sputtering up out of the water splashing herself vigorously to rinse away the remnants of the soap. Later, as she stood rubbing herself dry, she began running through her plans for the next day. It was time she began looking about for a ship to take her south. Better not try for Cheonea from here, better to change ships… she knew little about the powers of the limits of sorcery, she hadn’t a guess about how Setsimaksimin had found her… she was reasonably sure he was her enemy, she’d made enough others in her lifetime, though most of them had to be dead by now, besides there was the boy and the packet with its plea for her help… so she didn’t know if he could locate her again, but breaking one’s backtrail was an elementary tactic when pursued by man or some less deadly predator. Hmm. She’d always had a thing for ship captains… she grinned, toweled her head… maybe she could find herself another like Sammang or Chandro…