The Office of Shadow (46 page)

Je Wen smiled. "Because they are wasteful, and we are not."

After a few minutes of slow travel across the strange sea of refuse, they
began to near the edge, and the debris began to thin until Ironfoot found himself standing on a flat surface that gave beneath his feet, cushioning his steps.

"This is soft," said Ironfoot. "But I don't see how it kept us all from
being smashed to bits."

"It is a very clever net."

They reached the edge, which was a perfectly straight line, and Je Wen
hopped off onto the ground, a few feet below, which seemed to be moving
beneath them. It was lighter here, and now Ironfoot could see Je Wen's face.
It was strong and lined, there was a bit of light stubble on his head, and he
had a neatly trimmed beard that glowed white in the moonlight. His eyes
were clear and light, though it was difficult to tell whether they were blue or
gray in the monochrome world of night.

Ironfoot looked back into a sea of darkness.

"Come along," said Je Wen. Ironfoot noticed that Silverdun and Sela had
already jumped from the edge of the blackness, and that the other Arami
were handing their collected loot off to their comrades. They were moving slowly away from him. A little way away, wide carts pulled by long lines of
the tiniest horses Ironfoot had ever seen were stopping nearby.

He jumped off and stumbled again on the moving ground. He turned
and realized that, of course, it was not the ground that was moving, but the
"net," which followed along beneath the city.

"Does it track the city wherever it goes?" asked Silverdun.

Je Wen shook his head. "Only at night, and only when they pass nearby.
We know their paths and follow them as need requires."

Ironfoot watched the umbra recede. He looked up at the underbelly of
the city. From beneath, Preyia was an eyesore. Its hull was discolored and
uneven, dark. A fine mist fell from it.

"All that," said Ironfoot, pointing, "is one night's worth of garbage?"

"As I said," said Je Wen, "they are a wasteful people."

Timha was the last one off the net. He scowled at Je Wen, but came
anyway.

They walked to the carts as a group. Sela pointed out that it would be
polite to offer to help carry what the Arami had collected. Ironfoot took a
sack from one of the robed figures, who nodded in thanks, but did not speak.
As Ironfoot carried it to the carts, he peeked inside: a half-eaten loaf of bread,
a cabbage, a belt, a bolt of cloth, a cheese, and other items that he couldn't
identify in the darkness.

They reached the carts, and Ironfoot realized with surprise that the creatures pulling the wagons were not horses, but goats. Tall, short-horned goats
that made quiet guttural sounds as they stood impatiently in their harness.
The carts were low and wide, and their wheels huge.

"Come along," said Je Wen, motioning for Ironfoot, Silverdun, and Sela
to climb aboard the carts. "A large quake will come to this place in a few
minutes."

Presently the carts were all loaded with both goods and passengers. The
loot was carefully tied down in the backs of the carts. Ironfoot, Silverdun,
Timha, and Sela sat in the front cart with Je Wen. The goats hopped along,
pulling the cart faster than Ironfoot would have suspected, their heads popping up comically out of the tall wild grain that the carts now passed
through.

The ground suddenly shook, and the cart jerked to the left. Ironfoot realized why it was built so wide; the wheels on the right side of the cart leapt
off the ground for a moment, but there was no danger of the thing tipping.
The goats barely seemed to notice. Their hopping gait continued as if
nothing had happened.

"Look," said Je Wen, pointing. The city and its shadow were receding
across the uneven plain. The Arami net, seen from the side, was a large irregular black disk that floated a few feet off the ground. A loud crack like
thunder pealed in the night, and the earth beneath the city cracked open in
a shower of dust. The net crumpled and fell in on itself, and its contents
spilled haphazardly. Much of it fell into the new ravine that had been created
by the quake.

"Lovely, isn't it?" said Je Wen. "Everything returns eventually to its
source."

"Lovely" wasn't the first word that sprang to Ironfoot's mind, but it was
certainly impressive. He watched Preyia drift like a cloud across the sky, and
was glad to see it go.

The carts reached the end of the tall grain stalks, jostling along through
aftershocks of the quake that lessened over time and distance. They came to
an uneven, rocky plain peppered with tiny thornbushes and joined a rutted
track that cut across it toward a tiny valley. In places the track vanished only
to reappear a few yards on, and in other places the ruts zigzagged haphazardly, as if the ground beneath them had been torn apart and inexpertly
replaced. In the distance they heard the cries of wolves, which spooked the
goats, but they never saw them.

The track descended into the valley, where tents and cooking fires were
arranged in a circle with a large bonfire in the center. More goats were penned
nearby. Children came out of the tents and ran toward the carts as they
approached. They were dressed in a chaotic assortment of Unseelie clothing,
wilted finery and rough-hewn commoners' tunics. They shouted out in a
strange, staccato language that Ironfoot didn't recognize. When they saw
Ironfoot, Timha, Sela, and Silverdun, however, the children stopped and
looked to Je Wen.

Je Wen spoke to the children in the same rapid tongue, and they con tinned onto the carts, taking the bags of loot and the larger items. The children remained wary of the newcomers, however, and gave them a wide berth.

A very tall, very slender woman came out of one of the tents and looked at
the carts. She was dressed in a gentleman's silk blouse and a housemaid's dress.
A necklace of wooden beads was around her neck. All of the Arami stopped
what they were doing and watched as she approached. Clearly, she was someone
to be reckoned with. She stopped in front of Je Wen's cart and looked at Silverdun, then Sela, then Ironfoot, and finally Timha without speaking. The
entire camp had gone silent. Up close, Ironfoot saw that she was in early middle
age, perhaps forty, with a few streaks of gray in her long, wavy black hair.

Finally she scratched her head and said in unaccented Common, "I was
wondering when you four were going to show up."

The woman's name was Lin Vo, and she was the clan's leader. She ushered
them into her tent, which was no different from any of the others. A bit
smaller than most, in fact. The interior of her tent was decorated simply, in
the same random assortment of styles as her clothing. Nothing matched, and
some of the furniture seemed ludicrously unsuited to a nomadic lifestyle.
There was an expensive oil lamp atop an antique side table. The bed was a
wide mahogany four-poster complete with a gauze hanging atop it; the frame
had been broken, but had been efficiently nailed back together. The sheets
were silk, but stained with wine.

"Can I get you tea?" said Lin Vo, once they'd all been seated on comfortable cushions that were strewn on the mat-covered ground.

"Tea would be lovely, thank you," said Sela. Sela had a strange knack for
understanding what it was that people wanted to hear, so Ironfoot went along
with her and accepted as well.

Lin Vo went outside to her cooking fire and came back inside with a battered kettle filled with hot water. She measured some tea into an earthenware
teapot and emptied the kettle into it. Then she placed the pot and five
chipped porcelain cups on a silver tray and set it down in the midst of her
guests. She did all of this without speaking.

"You pour," she said to Sela. She watched carefully as Sela lifted the
kettle.

"Might I ask-?" began Silverdun, but Lin Vo cut him off with a harsh
look.

"Don't talk while someone's pouring tea," she said.

Once the tea was poured, Lin Vo took a cup and raised it to them. "The
Arami welcome you," she said.

"Now," she said, cutting off Silverdun, who was about to speak again.
"We can skip the formal introductions and back and forth. I know who all of
you are, and I know why you're here, and how you ended up here."

"You have the Gift of Premonition," said Silverdun.

Lin Vo scoffed. "You people and your Gifts. You always have to have
everything in nice neat rows. Twelve Gifts, twelve months in a year, twelve
constellations looking down over you. Have you ever seen a Chthonic cynosure? Big dodecahedron. They'll go on for hours about all the lines and facets
and vertices on it and what they mean."

"What do you want from us?" asked Timha. He'd been silent since they'd
arrived at the Arami camp, and was clearly scared out of his wits.

Lin Vo laughed. "Oh, Journeyer Timha. You're frightened, and I can see
why. But that's no excuse to be rude. Besides, it's not about what I want from
you, which is nothing, and all about what you need from me."

"And what is it that we need from you?" asked Silverdun.

"Well, it seems to me that you need a couple of things. You need to get
back to where you came from with our friend Timha in tow, and in order for
that to happen, you're going to need Je Wen to lead you down to the border.
Because if you try to make it on your own, you'll be dead in two days."

"A premonition?" asked Ironfoot.

"Merely stating the obvious," said Lin Vo. "Folks from up in the sky who
find their way down here have a tendency to wander into quakes or get eaten
by wolves."

"This is nonsense," said Timha. "Premonitive or not, this woman is
lying. We're most likely going to be held for ransom, and this tale is simply
to keep us docile in the meantime."

"I can see you're not going to let me get any work done," said Lin Vo to Timha. "So let's get this over with now. Here's what you think is going to
happen. You think you're going to waggle your fingers under your robe and
do something nasty and I'm going to fall over dead and you and your friends
are going to fight your way out of here."

Timha glared at her but said nothing.

"What's really going to happen is that you're going to try that and fail,
and then you're going to sit there and listen, and then when we're done you're
all going to say `Thank you very much, Lin Vo,' and then I'm going to send
you off with Je Wen at first light."

Timha still said nothing. Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot and said, "Watch
closely, Ironfoot. You're going to like this."

While her head was turned, Timha lifted his hands and drew a sigil of
unbinding in the air. This was the call to some spell that he'd memorized
previously and kept fully formed in his mind with a binding around it to
keep it contained. The sigil was meaningless to Ironfoot, but when the re
started condensing around him, he recognized immediately what Timha was
doing. He was creating a space of Motion around Lin Vo, stopping the vibration of all matter in a sphere around her. This sphere would not only immobilize her, but it would also render her body and the air around her solid and
freezing to the touch, killing her. Lin Vo sat looking at Timha, doing
nothing, looking disappointed.

Ironfoot watched closely, his re sense having become heightened along
with his strength and his other senses. What had Jedron done to him back
on Whitemount? He could almost see the flow of essence from Timha, channeled as Motion, enveloping Lin Vo. She was going to die.

"Timha!" shouted Silverdun, who was probably seeing this as well as
Ironfoot was. "Stop!"

Ironfoot moved to rush Timha, but before he could get up, something
strange happened. Lin Vo didn't move, but a warm pulse of re shot from her,
filling the room. But it was like no re Ironfoot had ever seen. Somehow Lin
Vo had used re without channeling it through one of the Gifts. It made no
sense. It was like a colorless color, or an animal that wasn't of any species, or
a sung note with no pitch. It was the reitic equivalent of division by zero. It
was simply not possible.

But there it was. Ironfoot watched, enthralled, as Lin Vo's re encompassed
Timha's Motion. It wasn't like a duel between battle mages; there was no
confrontation, no conflict. The two essences combined, and where Timha's
Motion had been, suddenly there was Elements, and the Elements swirled
back toward Timha, and the air around him turned to water.

Suddenly soaking wet, Timha flinched backward, staring at Lin Vo in
astonishment.

Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot. Only a second or two had passed since she'd
last spoken. "See what I mean? You liked it, didn't you?"

Ironfoot nodded, stymied. What he had just seen wasn't just impossible,
it was ... paradoxical.

Lin Vo took a deep breath and settled herself on her cushion. "There's a
towel behind you," she told Timha. "I had a feeling something like this
might happen."

There was indeed a towel. It was monogrammed. Timha rubbed his hair
with it, looking haunted. Lin Vo's display had not been lost on him, either.