"Pelzed says I owe him a roof."
"Pelzed knows you'll never pay," Wanshig said. "This is different. You owe Whandall."
Tras shrugged. "It may be, but how do I pay? It took nearly everything I had to buy myself away from the captain!"
"Why did you come here?" Whandall asked.
"Stories. It's a risk. If I stay away too long, I'll forget the Condigeano speech. You know how languages change. There'll be slang I don't know. What kind of teller would I be then? So I stayed in Condigeo long enough to learn, but I had to come back. It's time for a Burning, and I can't miss the next one. How long has it been, six years? Do you feel the Burning near?"
Wanshig said, "The next teller who asks that question dies."
Whandall asked, "Why is it so important?"
They were mixing Condigeano and common speech. Whandall was still the only Lordkin who could do that. Wanshig wasn't able to follow much of what they were saying. Tras said, "The fewer tellers watch the Burning, the better a story it makes. When the others go home, that's when it pays me to be here. But I wish your Yangin-Atep would stir himself."
"Alferth and Tarnisos started the last Burning," Whandall told him. "Shall I show them to you?"
"Man, those guys are weird," Wanshig, said. He shifted to an accent used mostly inside Placehold and spoke too rapidly for Tras to understand. "And you don't know where they are."
"I can find them," Whandall said.
"Sure." He looked at Tras, who was trying to understand what they were saying. "You're really not mad at him, are you?"
Whandall shook his head. "Not anymore."
"Well, they're over in Flower Market Square."
"How do you know that?"
"It's where they hang out now. There's a truce between Flower Market and Serpent's Walk." Wanshig changed to common speech. "You want to talk to the Lordkin who started the last Burning, give my brother five shells. You can afford that. Some other time we'll talk about more."
Alferth was a surly, burly man near thirty. There was a distorted look to his nose and ears. Whandall wasn't old enough to work out what had him so angry all the time, but he could imagine what Alferth's meaty hand would feel like, swung with that much weight behind it. He had no urge to talk to Alferth himself. But he stayed close after pointing Alferth out to Tras Preetror.
Tras sat down at Alferth's table at the end of a meal, set a flask between them, and asked, "What was it like to be possessed by Yangin-Atep?"
Alferth expanded under the looker's interest. "I felt an anger too big to hold back. Tarnisos screamed like a wyvern and charged into old Weaver's place, and I charged after him. We kicked him and his wife-I never saw his kids-we took everything we could, and then Tarnisos set the place afire. By then there were too many of us to count. I had an armful of skirts. For half a year I had a skirt for every woman who-"
"Why Weaver?"
"I think the old kinless refused Tarnisos credit once."
Tras asked, "Why would Yangin-Atep start with Weaver?"
Alferth's laughter was a bellow, a roar. Whandall left with a gaping sense of loss, a pain in the pit of his belly.
Chapter 17
When Whandall was an infant, Morth of Atlantis had brought water to the Lords. He must have been paid well. Now he kept a shop in what the Lords called the benighted section, far from the docks and the Lordshills.
It was not right to be stalking the man who had killed Pothefit during a gathering. Never remember a killing after the Burning. But Morth was a knot of enigmas. ...
Why would a wizard of power live in the benighted areas?
Why would a Lordkin of fourteen years' age visit a magic shop? Whandall had better have an answer ready for that.
He blocked the path of a dumpy woman in Straight Street. The kinless looked at him differently now he was near grown-no longer cute, not yet menacing while his knife was hidden-but still she fished in her purse and gave him money. Probably not enough. It didn't have to be.
He watched until the shop was empty of customers before he went in.
Morth of Atlantis was younger than he remembered from that night in Lordshills. Against all reason, Whandall had somehow expected that. It didn't even startle him that sparse hair white as salt was now sandy red. But he was still an old man of dubious humanity, tall and straight, with dry brown skin and a flat belly and an open, innocent face with a million wrinkles. A little silly, a little scary.
Whandall asked, "Can you cure pimples?"
The magician peered close. One quick straight thrust could have cut his
throat, but what spells protected him? "You've got worse than pimples." lie touched the inflammation by Whandall's eye. His hands were surprising: fingers widest at the tips! "That's ringworm. It'll never go away by itself. Thirty shells."
Whandall cursed mildly and showed the five the woman had given him. "Maybe later."
"As you wish."
A kinless would have bargained. Lordkin didn't, and maybe magicians didn't. Whandall asked, "You're from Atlantis?"
The man's face closed down.
"I'm Seshmarl of Serpent's Walk." Whandall knew better than to give his true name to a magician. "Savant, our younger street-brothers wonder about you. If you don't want to be asked over and over how you escaped Atlantis, tell it only once. I'm a good teller. I'll tell them."
"Are you?" Morth smiled at him. How could an old man have so many teeth? "Tell me a story."
Whandall hadn't expected this, but without a stammer he said, "Yangin-Atep was the god who brought the knowledge of fire to the world. But Zoosh beat him in a knife fight, so men began to serve Zoosh instead of tending fires for Yangin-Atep. Lifetimes later, only the Lordkin still serve Yangin-Atep. When we came south from the ice, Yangin-Atep traveled with us. Have you heard the tale?"
"Not from your view." .
"We weren't finding enough wood until the Lords showed us the way to the forest. There we hunted during the day and built big fires at night. In the forest Yangin-Atep grew strong. We cut and burned our way through, and that was how we found Tep's Town. The kinless called it something else, of course."
"Valley of Smokes," the magician said.
Whandall was taken aback. "Kinless called it that?"
"Have you seen how red the sunsets are here? Or how hard it is to breathe after the Burning? Something about the shape of the land or the pattern of winds keeps fog and smoke from blowing away. It isn't your fire god. Something older. A kinless god, maybe."
During the Burning and after, Mother's Mother's breath rasped as if she were dying. Whandall nodded.
"But the harbor is Good Hand, for the look of curled fingers." Morth saw Whandall's unspoken Huh? and added, "You have to see it from the air."
Oh, right, from the air. The magician had him totally off balance. Story, he was in the middle of a story-
"The kinless couldn't fight us, because Yangin-Atep was strong again. So the kinless came to serve us. They still wear the noose, as we still hold
their lives." Just its Mother's Mother had told the title to her grandchildren, with no mention of alliance with the Lords.
"I never would have taken that for a noose," Morth said. "A strip of colored cloth around the neck? Hangs down the chest?"
"That's it."