He brought his yizzy down until he was hanging over the edge of the lift platform. “N’Ceegh Pa’ao,” he said, his voice was a hoarse roar that had trouble cutting through the noise around us. “Escaped slave asking transport offworld. My son Zaraiz Pa’ao.” He patted the boy’s buttocks. “Surge got hold of him and I had to put him out. Give me a hand with him.”
“Right. How you want to do this?”
“Let me get the straps off.” He produced a wicked-looking scalpel from an armsheath and sliced through the braided thongs that tied the boy in place.
I got my hands around the child’s waist and lifted; he was small like most Hordar children, slight, a featherweight. I held him while the Pa’ao swung from the saddle and let the yizzy drift off. “We’ll go up to the bridge,” I said. “We can talk while I’m taking Chicklet back to Base. Mind leaving that cutter in the lock?”
“Uhnh, Fiddoodah’ak.” Before I could ask what that meant, his mouth split into a lipless grin. “Sure, no problem.”
He stripped off the battery and dropped it and the tube near the inner hatch. I gave him the boy and got busy; by the time I had the lift folded in and the outer lock dogged home, Pels had the drives humming.
When we reached the bridge, the Pa’ao laid the boy he’d called his son on the floor mat and dropped down to sit cross-legged beside him. He lifted the child’s head and shoulders into his lap and sat with one hand resting lightly on his son’s tangled black hair.
I took a last look at the chaos around us, goosed the tug into the air. I’d had more than enough of Tairanna, the Hordar and this whole rescue business.
XV
1. Three days after the taking of the Warmaster.
Karrel Goza in Ayla gul Inci/mid-morning/cloudy day, gusts of gray rain.
Gul Inci was empty. Empty even of death. No bodies in the streets. No bloodstains or char marks where inklins and others had burned. In the beast courts the stock complained, udders heavy with curdled milk, feed trays and water troughs empty, pet animals whimpered, whined or howled, hungry and parched, abandoned by those who were supposed to care for them. The wind snapped wash left hanging on the line when the Surge impulse came down on gul Inci, it banged doors left unlatched, rattled and banged shutters. It blew scraps of paper and other debris against and around Karrel Goza who came walking south from Sirgыn Bol where he’d left Windskimmer noselocked to a mooring mast.
He passed House after House emptied by the Surge impulse. He walked slower and slower, drew his fingers across the bright tessera inlaid in the brick of the courtwalls, Family marks and signs taken from Family history. He named the Houses as he touched their signs, a slow invocation of what had been. House Falyan. House Umtivar. House Borazan. House Ishlemmet. House Tamarta. Empty, echoing, disturbing. A kind of walking nightmare. He moved deeper into the city, walking streets he’d taken so many times before, Sirgыn Bol to Goza House, Goza House to Sirgыn Bol; he did not hurry, he pushed against a growing reluctance to see his own House empty like these others.
He moved past taverns and shops and other small businesses. For the first time he heard voices though he saw no one and none of the businesses were open.
He heard a steady creaking as he drew near the largest of the circles with its speaker minaret a topped-out stone tree in the middle. He remembered the last time he stood there, crowds pressing about him, Geres Duvvar bringing him a paper cone of hot nuts. His grief over the loss of his cousin intensified suddenly, as if he felt it for the first time. He stood looking at the wall he and Geres Duvvar had leaned against while they listened to the Stentor shout. After a while he was aware of the creaking again. He looked up. A body was suspended from the speaker’s platform. A hanged man. He moved around so he could see who it was. “Herk,” he breathed. The Fehdaz’s face was black and distorted and he was stripped naked, but there was no question who hung there. Another memory came back full force-Elmas Ofka that night she found her brother dead of torture. Herk will pay, she said. It may take years, but Herk will pay.
He shrugged. This wasn’t Elli’s work, she was too busy organizing the world. It didn’t matter. Herk the Jerk had enemies enough to guarantee he’d end like this. Without asking himself why he was doing it, he climbed the verdigrised spiral to the platform and cut the rope. He heard Herk’s body hit the stones with a loose boneless splat; the Fehdaz must have been hanging there for hours, more than a day, long enough for the death-stiffness to pass out of him. They took him when the Surge was just starting here, he thought, that’s why they hung him instead of tearing him apart.
He climbed back down and stood over the body. It hadn’t begun to stink yet, the weather was too cold for that. He pressed his fingers hard against his eyes. Too many memories here, he couldn’t let Herk dirty them. He dropped his hands and looked around for a place to put him.
The timbers of the Fekkri Gate were burned to stumps like rotted teeth and the pile itself was a shell, no more. He got Herk up and over his shoulder, carried the body into the Fekkri court and dropped it on the paving stones.
He left, brushing at himself, a little nauseated. He moved more quickly now, he had a better reason than duty to visit his House. He wanted a bath.
Goza House was in the southeast section of the city, where the Little Houses were and the tenements for the poor, the warehouses, the retting sheds and other factories, down near the water’s edge.
The two parts of the main gate were moving in the wind, but not enough to swing closed. Seeing them like that made him angry. The gates of the Great Houses were closed, latched, probably locked though he had not thought to try them. Here the Houses were left open to the wind and whatever thieves escaped the Surge, here where the people were poor and not important. He went through the wall-arch and into the Front Court.
The wind blew dead leaves into dust devils. A solitary spray of rain hit him in the face. The House was dead. Everyone was gone, even the Elders. He folded his arms across his chest, hugged them tight against him. It was like his grief for Geres Duvvar, and somehow worse. There was no focus, only a free-floating desolation. “They make a desolation and call it peace,” he said aloud.
“What’s that mean?”
Karrel Goza looked around, not seeing who it was who spoke to him.
Tazmin Duvvar stepped from the Duvvar Court, stood leaning against a gate pillar. “What’s that?” he repeated.
“Someone said it a long time ago and a long way from here. I don’t know who or where. The Outsider at the Mines, the teacher, you remember, she told it to her students and one of them told it to me. It just came to mind.”
“Mmh, morbid,” Tazmin Duvvar said. “Sounds to me like you need a hot meal and a night’s sleep. Let your liver sweeten.”
“How long you been back?”
“I got here yesterday morning. I wasn’t ferrying yips about like you, cousin. One look at the looting there at the Palace and I thought hard times are coming and I better make sure we’ve got the stuff to ride ’em out, that it didn’t walk out in some stranger’s pouch.”
“You see Herk?”
“Hard to miss. Wonder who did it?”
Karrel Goza stretched, yawned. “One thing I know, half Inci’s going to claim they were in on it. Any hot water?”
“Started the boilers this morning. Bath?”
“Yeh. I cut the bastard down, I didn’t like seeing him there. Dumped him in the Fekkri Court. I need to wash him off me.”
Tazmin Duvvar looked up at the clouds, ignoring another brief flurry of rain. “Somebody’s going to have to do something about him if the wind keeps on in this direction; another day or two and we’ll be smelling him.” He moved away from the pillar and followed Karrel Goza around the house. “What’s happening in Gilisim? Did they ever find Old Pittipat or the Grand Sech?”
“Not yet. What’s happening?” Karrel Goza stripped off his jacket and began undoing the fastenings on his shirt. “More of everything you saw before you cut out. More looting, more dead. People wandering around like they’re walking in their sleep. We haven’t begun to sort out who’s what and where they belong, let alone identified the dead. The best guess I heard is as much as a third of us is dead somewhere around Gilisim. It’s going to be a job, getting them buried. Elmas Ofka, her isyas and the Council from the Mines, they’ve got together with vips from the west coast and up from Guneywhiyk. Trying to work out how to organize things now there aren’t any more Huvved and the slave techs are gone, most of them. It’s a mess, Taz. Every one of them has his own idea how to run things. Bless the Prophet, Elli smoothes them down and gets them to start making sense. Not that she’s any saint herself; we’re going to have to watch and make sure she doesn’t take up where Tra Yarta left off.” He pulled open the door to the bathhouse, went in.