Ariah (6 page)

It was approaching dusk when I left the building. The sun sat low on the horizon, bloody and wounded. Dirva was waiting for me, flanked on either side by guards. I was a wreck, and I’m sure everything could be seen on my face, but his was meticulously impenetrable. He showed nothing at our reunion.

“
Ariah, come with me,” he said. He thanked the guards for their time and their protection of the Empire’s borders and wished them pleasant days ahead in flawless Border Qin. His voice was strong but deferent. His carriage was tall but compliant. As he led me to our camels, I could feel the guards watching me. I wanted desperately to turn and see them, to feel them out. Dirva kept an iron hand on the back of my neck and forced me to look forward. I am grateful for that still.

Abira stood with our camels. She helped me secure my pack to the saddle and coaxed the camel down so I could mount it before she mounted her own. She held the reins of my camel in her hand and led him along beside hers. We passed through the gate into the narrow strip of badlands, which separated the Empire from the City. We rode in silence for an hour or two—long enough for night to fall and the gate to turn into nothing more than a dark spot in the distance.

We spoke again as we made camp. Dirva set up our tent, and Abira built a fire to stave off the night’s chill. I beat a stake into the ground and tied the camels’ reins to it. She waved me over to sit next to her. She looked grim. “You all right? Lor said you had a time back there.”

“
I’m all right.”

Abira looked me over. She smiled slightly and patted my shoulder. “You’re a good kid. You owe me big, you know.”

“
Why?”

“
I traded my drums to get you out of there.”

PART TWO:

THE CITY OF MAGES

CHAPTER 4

It took us two days of travel through the Inalan badlands before we reached the City walls. We sold the camels to an Inalan man lingering just outside the city. I steeled myself for another round of suspicious Qin searches as we were ushered into the City. The City of Mages is a Qin protectorate and had always been discussed as thoroughly Qin by those in the Empire. I assumed it functioned as a bastion of Qin culture and governance even if it was not technically part of the Empire. I was both right and wrong.

We entered through the City’s East Gate. On one side of the walls was the emptiness of the badlands; on the other side was a loud and bustling city. Peacekeepers lazily walked the tops of the walls, peering out at the desert for nothing in particular. Dirva, Abira, and I were waved through. We came to a narrow corridor of stately stone buildings. Awnings had been hung against the sides of the buildings, and tables were laid out in neat rows in the shade. A handful of peacekeepers stood here and there, each with a crossbow strapped to his back. Each was Qin.

We were waved over to one of the shaded tables by fox-faced red elf with ink-stained hands. She wore the same uniform as the peacekeepers—a set of official Qin robes, which were slightly out of date compared to those in the Empire—though she lacked a crossbow. “You all speak Qin?” she asked. She spoke perfect High Qin. She had the ease of a native speaker with it. I found it disorienting, hearing that language come out of her face.

“
Yes,” said Dirva. He slid his papers across the table to her, and Abira and I followed suit. She flipped through our papers. She smiled and glanced up at Abira. “Welcome home.” She said this in City Lothic.

“
Glad to be back,” Abira said.

The red elvish border guard raised her eyebrow. “No love for the Empire?”

“
Not a bit.”

The improbable border guard laughed. “Well, it’s got no love for us either, eh? You traveling with Imperials?”

Abira shrugged. “They’re elves, right? Long story anyway.”

“
Fair enough.” The border guard picked up a large, well-worn stamp, smashed it onto a pad of black ink, and stamped Abira’s papers. She turned to me and Dirva. When she spoke to us, it was in Qin again. “Reasons for entry?”

“
Personal,” Dirva said. “Ariah is my student.”

She stamped out papers and handed them back. “Enjoy your visit.” As I started to stand, the border guard caught my eye. “Don’t you and yours have a saying? Something about keeping your gifts secret?” she asked in Semadran.

I blinked at her. “I’m sorry, what?”

Dirva leaned across the table. “I know a man.” She waved us off and beckoned over a new immigrant.

“
Dirva, what was that? Was she an official?” I asked as we stepped into the crowd.

“
She is, yes. This is not the Empire. The Qin control the government, but there aren’t that many Qin here. They need bodies to fill the positions. They’ll take anyone who is not nahsiyya as long as they are either Qin or they were born here in the City.” He pulled me out of the path of a fruit cart. “She was trying to tell you to get your papers forged. She was trying to tell you to keep your shaping undeclared.”

“
It’s illegal.”

“
Perhaps, but if you’d done it, Abira would not have lost her drums,” he said. He left it at that.

We walked deeper and deeper into the City. The East Gate spits you out into the Qin Quarter. It is a strange place for someone born and bred in the Empire. The City is a populous place built on a small square of land; the buildings are solid stone and built tall, story upon story upon story. The streets are narrow. In the Empire, cities sprawl. The buildings are predominantly adobe and rarely more than one story. Only the most important and official buildings are made of stone. The streets are wide with plenty of space for carts and rickshaws. The Qin are a people who like open space. We Semadrans in our ghettos pile on top of each other, struggle through thin alleyways, but the Qin take up as much room as they can. But there in the City, they are penned in like a herd of livestock.

We walked fast, heads down. If it makes sense, the Qin in the City are somehow more Qin than those in the Empire. I think it’s to do with them being outnumbered and not quite as in charge of things as they’d like to be. They are more religious and more vocal about it. Every third building had an Eye of the Exalted, intricately worked in silver, bolted above the doorway. Everyone’s hair reached their elbows. The hoods of their robes were universally pulled up. As we passed through, whispers crowded us. Nahsiyya, impure, ghalio, tinker—whatever they had to say was said. Abira’s face grew redder and redder as we walked on. Dirva had her by the elbow in a grip tight as a vice. I think he was reading her, because every time she started to turn or open her mouth, he told her under his breath to keep walking.

All quarters of the City open into the Main Square. The Magi who supposedly built this city had a reverence for stark geometry. The streets are precise, grid-like, the width proportional to the density of buildings. Each quarter is a perfect square with hundreds of squared blocks embedded within it. At the heart of the City is the Main Square, an open plaza paved with long slabs of stones intricately fitted in a dazzling fractal. Seen from above it is something almost religious in nature. Seen from the ground, especially when the Square is somewhat empty, it can be disorienting and dizzying, the way going down a very long, unbroken flight of stairs can be. The Square is the seat of City government: the courthouse takes up much of one side, and Sanctuary takes up another. Next to Sanctuary is a Qin temple. The City Library—a building of stark and incomparable beauty—overshadows the entire city on the Square’s northern edge. The City Library has a timelessness woven into its stonework. It is a building that I found overwhelming in its size and perfection. Every angle is exactly 90 degrees. Every face of stone is exactly smooth, down to the last infinitesimal speck.

All the grandeur of the Square is undone by the shambling building struggling to stay upright on the south side. It is a patched thing, with walls made of hunks of wood, sheets coated in dried mud, anything that could be nailed to the failing bones of the building. Parts of the structure were still stone, but much of the original walls now lie around the house in crumbled boulders of varying sizes. The roof sagged heavily on one side. A set of platforms had been secured with some bare competence to the outside of one of the sturdier walls. A pair of very thin youths sat on it, smoking and peering out at the falling night. I could feel them watching us as we crossed the Square. This building had a defiance to it, a willful sense of survival, like it dared the stately institutions in the rest of the Square to knock it down. Abira grinned wide when she saw it, and I knew this had been her home. She and the shambling, careless building had the same spirit.

When we were halfway across the Square, one of the youths on the makeshift balcony stood up. The way the light fell cast him as a silhouette, an empty spot of black. He whistled. The sound was piercing, sharp, and carried through the Square, which grew steadily emptier as the sun set. Abira laughed and waved her arms. Beside me, Dirva sighed. There was an electric tension in him. He took Abira’s elbow and drew her over. “I’m going to Da. Can you get Ariah settled?”

“
C’mon, you’re not going to see them?”

“
I’ll see them,” he said. “Just not tonight. Can you get him settled?”

Abira pulled her arm out of his grasp with a sharp, sure jerk. The violence of her movement surprised me. She was quiet for a long second. “Yeah. All right. I’m bringing everyone by tomorrow. We’re a family, right, you can’t be here for Da without being here for the rest of us, too.”

Dirva was, to my practiced eye, visibly relieved. He turned to me. “Abira will get you settled. I will come by tomorrow morning and make sure you are all right.” I nodded. “Ariah, thank you for coming here.”

I smiled and looked away to hide it. I may have blushed. “We are cut from the same cloth.”

“
Still,” he said, “thank you for coming with me. I will see you tomorrow morning.”

Abira and I watched him walk the Square. He disappeared into the crowds on one of the eastern streets. “He likes you,” Abira said. There was a roughness in her voice, which made me wary.

“
He’s my mentor. We’re cut from the same cloth.”

“
Yeah, that must be a tink thing. I don’t know why you keep saying it,” she said, shouldering her pack. “At least he likes somebody. C’mon. It’s a long walk from here to my place and I’d like to crash before dawn breaks. Let’s get you settled, kid.”

I had hoped in vain that wherever I was to be settled for the night was a safe distance away from the decrepit monstrosity in the Square. I was wrong. As we walked steadily towards it, on a course of inevitable collision, dread sat heavier and heavier in the pit of my stomach. I began to suspect—for the first time since I’d agreed to travel with Dirva—that perhaps I should have stayed put in the Empire, training be damned.

A bright burst of laughter rang through the air when Abira and I drew close. One of the people perched on the balcony swung himself down to the ground, agile as a monkey. He was fast, and he ran to Abira and hugged her before I had a clear sense of what was going on or who he was. He was a blur of dark skin and red hair.

“
Oh, Abbie, you’re back!” he said. By virtue of the gift of mimicry, I suppose, I pay a lot of attention to people’s voices. His voice was an odd blend of quiet and forceful, deep and soft. His was a baritone voice that was surprising given that he was not a large man. He pulled back away from her just enough to see her face. They held each other close and spoke like no one else was around. “He stayed behind, didn’t he?”

“
No, he came,” Abira said. Her voice held surprise in it, and triumph. She stepped back and pulled me over. “And he brought this with him. Ariah, that’s my kid brother, Sorcha. Sorcha, Ariah. Ariah’s gonna crash at the squat house.”

Sorcha noticed me for the first time then. He looked me over, up and down, measuring and final like Abira when I first met her. He has an extraordinarily expressive face, and I could read his mind without help from any gift; anyone could have. He looked me over, he smirked at my Semadran clothes, the stiffness of my posture, and then he grinned a silent proposition. I burst into nervous laughter. His eyebrows flicked up, and his grin grew that much more canny. Abira shoved me towards him. I landed about two inches away from him. We saw exactly eye to eye; Sorcha and I were exactly the same height. “You get him settled in, would you?” she said. “I just want to get back to the Refuge and crash already.”

“
You could crash here for the night,” Sorcha said. I had long since dropped my gaze and was peering idly out at the Square on no pretense at all, but I could feel him staring at me as he said it.