Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Ricardo Pinto

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Aurum took a step forward. 'Abase yourself before your Masters, slave.' His voice filled the hall.

The black man flinched but his face remained hard with defiance.

Aurum unmasked to reveal his cold white anger.

The black man cowered away, almost closing his eyes. The blade trembled in his grip.

'Kneel!' boomed Aurum.

The black man closed like a mussel.

'Hold these,' Aurum said quiedy, thrusting the lantern and mask into Vermel's hands. Shadows slid this way and that as Vennel fumbled, then they steadied.

'Come, kneel, it'll be better that way. It'll be better,' coaxed Aurum.

The black man's knees cracked against the floor. He bowed his head, his arm still out to one side, stiff clutching the knife.

Aurum took a few strides towards him, bent down, grabbed the man's hair, yanked back his head. In the glare of the Master's face, Carnelian saw the amber eyes strain round with terror. There was a glint at the black man's throat, a slicking sound. He gurgled, then grimaced. Aurum kicked his body away with a snort, wiping his hand down his robe. The black man twitched, face down on the floor, a black halo spreading round his head, his fist still gripping the knife.

Vennel was frozen. 'It tried to kill me.'

Jaspar circled the corpse as if it were a rabid animal. After surveying it he moved in, placed a ranga shoe on the wrist, crunched it down against the floor. Using a fold of his robe, he stooped down and worked the knife out of the dead man's grip. He held it up. 'A kitchen knife?' He sounded amazed. He flung it away with a clatter that made Carnelian jump.

That it should dare threaten one of the Chosen,' said Vennel. 'It is quite, quite, quite unbelievable.' 'It was attacking you?' Jaspar demanded. 'It sought my life.'

'It was me he was trying to kill,' said Carnelian quietly. Two masks and the old man's face snapped towards him.

'Explain yourself,' said Aurum. Carnelian looked down at the man lying in the blood. 'He saw my face.' 'What do you mean?'

That man lying there, he saw my face. The night we were attacked, he saw my face.'

'You little fool,' said Vennel, lunging towards Carnelian.

Aurum overtook him. He caught Carnelian by the shoulders and shook him till his mask was askew. 'Why did you say nothing at the time?'

Carnelian tore free of Aurum's hands and stared back into his cold eyes. He tried to slide the mask back into place. 'I did not want him to die. Not when his sin had come from the saving of our lives.'

Jaspar coughed a nervous laugh. Carnelian glared at him. He was close to blurting out that not only he but also Jaspar had been guilty of the same sin. The same sin, except that at least Carnelian had demanded nothing for his silence.

Suddenly, he was shoved round so that he was looking at the man bleeding over the floor. He looked away.

'Look at it,' Aurum said. 'Look at it, I say.'

Carnelian obeyed. The gash was a slack-lipped smile opening a mouth in the corpse's throat.

That thing could have spilled your precious blood.' Aurum's fingers dug into his arm. The Law of

Concealment must be obeyed. It is not some arbitrary nonsense. It is meant to stop that!' His finger jabbed at the corpse.

'Look,' shrilled Vennel, 'look.' He pointed at Carnelian's feet. 'He does not even wear the ranga.'

Aurum released him, turned away.

'One would have thought the boy would have learned something from the debacle on the baran,' said Vennel.

Hatred of the Masters overpowered Carnelian. He remembered Crail. He remembered that they had opened the chasm between him and his own father, whom even now they were expecting to die. He remembered Jaspar using Tain's eyes to bait his trap. He opened his mouth to spit his bitterness at them but at that moment his father's ravings came from behind the door, and he felt his anger seep away.

'Now we see the consequences of all this secrecy,' said Vennel. 'If we had travelled with our guardsmen this would never have happened.'

Aurum turned an icy face to Carnelian. 'Go and sleep.'

Carnelian went to his father, remembering what he had said. Before he closed the door, he heard Aurum say, 'We had better hide the carcass… Yes, with our own hands. Everything must be done to avoid this contagion of rebellion spreading to the others. The creatures will all have to be destroyed.'

CROSSING THE WHEEL

Facilitate commerce, encourage avarice, allow the widest variation in rank and wealth: let our subjects find enemies amongst themselves. The slave who is thrown the leavings from his master's table, will not have the stomach for rebellion.

(a precept of the Wise, from the Domain of Tribute)

Carnelian had his back against the bed. He so wanted to sleep but he had to guard the embers of his father's life. In his grip, his father's hand felt like ice. All night Carnelian had held on to him to stop him being tugged away. His muscles ached from the effort. Each time death pulled, his father would first heat like a kettle, raving ever more loudly, then cool until the sweat was beading on his skin. Silence would then come so suddenly that each time Carnelian thought him gone. A whisper of breath, a tiny trembling in a vein would turn his grief to anger. He would stare at the fevered face, grinding his teeth, wanting to rail at his father, to blame him, to tell him that it was not fair to leave him alone to shoulder all the burden. When he had managed to pack the anger back in somewhere he dried his father's face and rewrapped his body in the covers he had thrown off.

Drowsing over him Carnelian would sometimes become aware that his hand was stroking his father's head or his lips were mumbling one of Ebeny's healing songs. Once he wondered if it was perhaps their charm that stoked the fire inside his father's shell until it glowed red again and the babbling came hissing out. He had stood watch over him as long as he could, then had slumped to the floor, his head a hollowed stone in his hands.

Now his father was sleeping quietly and it seemed that the fever had passed into Carnelian. Tremors moved across his skin as if something were burrowing under it. He was desperate to sleep, to escape the numbness, to dull the pain.

Sounds were coming through the wall. One of the Masters was stirring. He swivelled his head round. A window slit showed a shade paler than night. The morning. A sigh deflated his body. Osrakum. Today, Osrakum. He opened his mind to receive the vision. He waited, then closed it when nothing came in. Was this to be the day his father died?

Something heavy struck the door. Groaning, Carnelian stood up, to put his body up as a shield between the door and his father's face. He fumbled his mask up to hide his own. The door opened to frame a darkness in which an oval floated like a summer moon. Aurum came in stooping, trapping the whole room in the mirror of his mask. It fell away to reveal his Master's face creased with dismay. That look sharpened Carnelian's own fears.

Take this,' Aurum said and pushed his mask onto Carnelian so that he had to let go of his father's hand. The old Master leaned over Suth and bent to touch the dangling veined marble of his hand.

'His blood still burns.' Aurum's face smoothed as he pulled his hand back over his grey stubbled head. 'Perhaps there is still time.'

'Perhaps…?' Carnelian's stomach curdled. 'Why should there not be enough time? Surely, we are only a few stages away from the Wise?'

Aurum's eyes were dulled, looking at some inner landscape. There is much that can happen along those few stages.'

'You mean Ykoriana?'

Aurum's eyes ignited. 'Bite your tongue. Just make sure you do what you can to keep your father alive. The rest is not your concern.'

The cistern wobbled sinuous patterns across the rafter-latticed ceiling. The Masters held their aquar themselves. Aurum had dismissed the grooms so that they would not witness a Master's weakness. Jaspar clucked his impatience to be gone. An aquar was made to sink. With Aurum's help, Carnelian wrestled his father's body into the saddle-chair. They ignored Vermel's question about his health. Carnelian took the reins and held them as he and the others mounted. He tied them to his chair.

Outside, it was cold. Lazy sounds came up from the encampment. Carnelian felt the unease around him. Vennel's mask could not decide whether it wanted to look at his father or at the Marula. Jaspar's maintained a constant oblique angle to the Marula. The barbarians were clumped a little way off, already mounted. Their heads hung as if they slept in their chairs. They had turned their backs on the road ahead as if by not seeing it they could make it go away. Behind them, beneath an indigo sky, Osrakum's wall was a gloomy island rising from the sea of mist that submerged the city.

Carnelian looked for Tain among the Marula. Wearied almost to tears, already grieving for his father, Carnelian knew he must find the energy to buy back his brother's eyes.

Mist fingered the grim sleeping face of the land as they rode. It reached into Carnelian's cloak to chill his skin. Its breath smelled damp and mouldy. The vague shapes of the Masters floated near him. The scratch of claws on the road seemed far away. Ahead, the Marula were wading through the twilight.

The sky paled, the blur cleared a little and Carnelian saw that they were riding along a causeway through a land of folded mud. Tarnished silver mirrors lay along the folds across which furtive creatures were spreading rings. Ridges bristled with reeds. Cranes lifted languidly into the air and flapped their angled silhouettes off, trailing their legs.

Ahead on a rutted mud shelf moored to the road like a raft another encampment was coming alive. Air fuzzed blue with smoke. Muffled voices worried the silence. The edges of a watch-tower contrasted with the liquid curves all around it. It grew huge and so solid that it made the fen look like a painted backcloth.

Then it was dropping behind and for a while Carnelian dozed away his misery only vaguely aware of the mottled dull-mirroring rush on either side. Mounds began curving up from the mud like the humps of huge fish, some with hovels on their backs, others caught in patches of netting. Carnelian sat up. Runs of grey water slipped around the mounds. Huts stood everywhere on legs. Boats lay half out of water, hiding like children behind tarpaulin skirts. Then he saw the edge of the city ahead. A mud bank textured with houses and shrubby trees. The carcass of some immense monster rotting on the marsh. A stench was floating on the wind. Their aquar drummed along the leftway. The buildings ahead were rising higher. Soft-edged canals branched off into the marsh patinated with scum, littered with boats like dead leaves. Here and there pimpling the mud in the distance little citadels of trees hid houses.

The stench of the city was wafting stronger. The channels Carnelian could see were matted with filth. Two towers with sagging walls formed a kind of gateway through which the city received the road. They flashed between them and in among the mess of tenements. The angles of walls and alleys jagged his eyes. He could not make out a pattern. It was like a termite mound cut open and exposed to a rain that had melted everything together. Now and then he would see a flight of steps winding down to a canal hemmed in by rickety warehouses, along which long punts were sliding.

Then they came to a more prosperous region where the tenements wore blistered whitewash. The stench was ever changing like music. The mud walls heaved closer, riddled with passages, spined with the ends of beams that betrayed the anatomy of floors within. Dusty gardens crammed into corners. A single fig tree roofed a courtyard with its branches. In the midst of all this riot another watch-tower rose like a woman wading through rubbish up to her waist.

As they slowed, the city's perfume thickened: mouldering mud, frying, the tang of slimed alleys, the dull odour of stagnant water, the vinegar reek of men.

Aurum had reached the monolith guarding the watch-tower door. Their aquar swung their heads from side to side as they slowed from their run. Aurum commanded the Marula to dismount. He herded them with his aquar behind the monolith and disappeared. Carnelian was intent on the saddle-chair holding the huddle that was his father. He leaned close, desperate for some sign of life. His father's aquar adjusted its feet and the huddle gave a groan that let Carnelian breathe again. 'My Lord?' he whispered but there was no reply. He looked round at the others.

'Where has Aurum gone?' He did not even attempt to mask the anger in his voice.

Jaspar motioned with his head.

Carnelian turned his aquar and saw that Aurum was there, his gold face peering from his hood.

'Why do we stop, my Lord?' Carnelian demanded.

To leave the leftway and descend to the road.'

Jaspar's hands expressed surprise. 'Into the herd?'

'We cannot do that,' said Carnelian.

There is no choice, my Lord,' said Aurum.

There must be. The delay – not to mention the commotion – it will kill my father.'

Aurum rode up to him. 'Last night I sent a messenger to the gates to announce our coming along this leftway. For that very reason we must leave it. This road leads only into peril.'

'You anticipate another attack, Aurum?' asked Jaspar.

Carnelian noticed that the Master's voice lacked its usual note of amused detachment. 'Surely we do not know for certain there will be another attack.'

There will be another attack,' Aurum said darkly.

'Even if there is, how can my Lord be certain where it will occur?'

The messenger, my Lord, the messenger,' snapped Vennel.

Carnelian turned on him. 'Does my Lord not think it possible that his mistress will see through Lord Aurum's subterfuge?'

'You are impertinent, my Lord.'

'Nevertheless, Vennel, my cousin makes a reasonable point,' said Jaspar.

Aurum lifted his hands. 'I have taken all this into consideration. Our enemies will see in the messenger our attempt to hide our intention to leave this leftway. It would be unlike them not to see through this deception. Thus, they will expect us on the leftway. We shall thus do the unexpected by in fact leaving the leftway.'

'In other words, my Lord, you have no idea whatsoever where our enemies are looking for us,' Carnelian said. 'For all we know they will be waiting for us on either route. Since this is possible it behoves us to take whichever route will more quickly bring my father to his healing by the Wise.'

Vennel gave him a nod. 'On the contrary, if there is danger both ways we would be better in the marketplace of the Wheel where we would be as invisible as fish in the sea.'

Jaspar squeezed his hands together. 'Let us not forget the filthy Marula. It would be prudent, cousin, if we were to find them work to do. The crowds will distract them.'

Carnelian felt that the situation was slipping away from him. 'Since when are the Chosen fearful of such animals?'

'Since, my Lord,' sneered Vennel, 'they are poisoned near unto death and know that we slew one of their number and, no doubt, will soon find a way to slay them all.'

'If we move down to the road a greater distance will be put between them and their antidote. This will endanger them as much as it does my father. Surely they will know this and so become more dangerous.'

They will know nothing,' Vennel said scornfully. 'Did you not yourself say that they are animals?'

Carnelian cast around him. 'My father still has his vote.'

'Would you use up his last strength?' said Aurum. Carnelian hesitated and looked from one mask to the next.

'Lord Suth should form no part in our calculations,' said Jaspar. 'It is unlikely he will live.'

Aurum's hand darted up to cut short Carnelian's outrage. Enough. 'If we three vote together we will carry the decision.'

Vennel and Jaspar nodded.

'It is decided then. We will descend to the road.' Vennel made no attempt to conceal the note of triumph in his voice.

Carnelian went cold with anger. 'If my father should die…' he said through gritted teeth.

'You will be elevated to Ruling Lord.'

'A privilege rare in one so young,' said Jaspar and turned his aquar away.

As the others filed into the watch-tower, Carnelian gazed down the leftway that narrowed off into a hazy crush of towers dwarfed by the dark mountain wall. The entrance to the Canyon of the Three Gates had widened into a narrow valley. Standing guard on either side of it were manikins almost hidden in its shadow. The mass of the city between served to cut them off at the knees. Carnelian shook his head, making no sense of their scale. What was certain, however, was that there was still a long ride to the gates and through the crowds it would take much, much longer.

He rode into the tower in despair, pulling his father's aquar after him, muttering under his breath, over and over again, 'He'll hang on. He'll hang on.'

In the gloom he could make out the immense shapes of the Masters on their aquar. In his anguish he had almost forgotten Tain. He tied the reins of his father's aquar to his own saddle-chair and then joined the Masters' line. When his turn came he turned his aquar onto the first ramp and his father's followed after. Halfway down one of the ramps he managed to get close to Jaspar. He forced his pain aside, his anger, his hatred and reached out to pull the Master's sleeve.

We must talk, he signed when he had Jaspar's eyes. The Master pointed inquiringly at Suth. Carnelian shook his head. They let the others move round the landing and begin descending the next ramp. Carnelian moved his hands into the light of a lantern.

If I pay your price, he signed, you will forget my brothers sin?

Your slave will keep his eyes, signed Jaspar with eager fingers.

'Swear on your blood.' 'You challenge my honour?' 'Swear!'

Jaspar protested but swore the oath.

Carnelian signed the lie his father had given him. He hoped that Jaspar would interpret the tremble in his signs as guilt at the betrayal.

As they moved out onto the road, it was like walking into a crowded room. Carnelian resisted putting his hands over his ears lest their brightness should betray them. He ground his teeth. All around, people were packing up and getting ready to move on. Feet were smudging fires to smoke. Uneven walls shoved in on every side, echoing the clatter.

Aurum ordered the Marula forward through the encampment. They sat in their saddle-chairs like dummies. Carnelian's aquar was disturbed by all the commotion. He looked round to see his father's shy away from some children and almost cried out when his father slumped over. More and more people were gathering to look at them. Soon they would be revealed as Masters. The news would pass all along the road and choke it. Their attackers would know where they were. Seeing the danger, Aurum moved into the Marula and woke them with his anger. Their uncurling seemed as slow as ferns. The Master's hand flashed a jab into the ribs of one of them. The man jerked up into a grimace and threatened the Master with his lance. Aurum grew larger in his chair. The man withstood his menace for a moment before bowing his head and going to join the others.

The Marula began pummelling their way through the crowd. Their stiff arms rose and fell as they cleared a path for the Masters. People grumbled out of their way. Some fell, losing their bundles to be trampled by the aquar. Others were pushed onto those behind and came to blows. Anger rippled out into the crowd. Carnelian could see the Marula were wasting what little strength they had left. Their hands lifted less frequently, less high. In one place a Maruli was driving some men back against a huimur whose driver struck at their backs with his goad. One man turned to fight. Another was shoved forward by the stump of the huimur's horn as it tossed its head. His companions turned on the Maruli, shouting, threatening him with sticks. The black man's aquar shied back, plumes jittering, as he struggled to control it. Two of his brothers raised a baying in which Carnelian could hear weary desperation. Their mouths stretched in a fixed gape. They gleamed with sweat and pain and anger. They began a feverish stabbing. Throats in the crowd pumped out cries of panic. People tried to escape. Carnelian watched one of the Marula breaking his lance in a woman's body. Her face registered surprise as she plucked at the wood poking from her breast before slumping into the arms of the people around her.

They are out of control,' Vennel cried over the roar.

Jaspar backed away and his posture suggested he was looking for some direction in which to flee.

It was Aurum who rode forward into the carnage, his shrouded figure serene in the midst of fury. His huge hands pulled the Marula back. Carnelian looked on nervously as the Marula mobbed him. Aurum's cowled head looked around at them. The Marula hesitated and their mouths' rictus slacked. When Aurum came back through the roar the Marula were about him, obedient, menacing only those who came too close.

The Masters and Marula percolated through the crowds. Campfires and wagons forced wide detours. The Marula angled their lances up and the gore ran down the shafts. Carnelian turned his face just enough to see their eyes darting and the way their faces twitched as if under their cloaks something were eating into them. When they scowled and showed their teeth they looked like demons but mostly they looked like old men.

Each slow step made Carnelian despair. His father's time was running out. He was letting go of what little hope he had left when a clamouring of bells drifted from somewhere up ahead. Like ice on a spring river the crowd broke into chunks and began to drift forward along the road. Their exhalations overpowered the stench of the city. Wheel-creak, footfalls and chatter drowned the bells. They picked up speed. Hope returned like an ache. Carnelian searched ahead for the dawn. The sky above the dark wall of Osrakum was already blue but the sun still hid behind her rampart. The light that filtered down into the canyon only served to reveal the contempt with which its guardians were looking down on the toy towers of the city.

Visions of the termite city interwove his weary vigilance. Yellow walls mottled like the flanks of lizards. The tunnel of an alleyway; glimpsed shadowy doors; a brilliant flutter of doves; light slicking on a scum-fringed canal. Bridges swagged everywhere and the faded bunting of clotheslines. Tenements rose higher, opened shuttered mouths and breathed out the perfume of a thousand rooms. Carnelian glimpsed the face of a girl looking down at them. A child swung on a beam end. People melted off into alleyways. Once the dirty curtain of tenements parted and he saw the long mound of another road rising faintly off across the hut-pebbled mirrored fen, angling towards them so that he guessed that they converged somewhere up ahead like the spokes of some gigantic wheel.

He was startled by a swell of sound, as if a door had opened nearby. A width of steps cascaded the crowd down to a harbour jostling with punts. Water lapped the lower steps where barefoot, half-naked people were unloading barges. He darted his gaze over the bobbing heads on the road about him, looking for assassins. He peered round past the mesmerizing circling of spokes, the pendulum palanquins, to see his father's chair. The body sagging in its curve looked already dead.

Barbarian voices babbling made Carnelian raise his eyes, see fingers pointing ahead and follow them to a pale rectangle flanked by two massings of shadow. As he drifted closer he began to hear a sound like swarming bees. The carpet of their march dragged slowly on. The shadows solidified into two gatehouses like sentinels standing guard upon the road. The buzzing had become a distant roar. He passed the last tenement whose sharp edge defined the beginning of airy space. Voices broke out around him in excited exclamation. From the babble he gleaned the single word, 'Wheel.'

Carnelian's eyes widened with wonder as he reached the threshold of a moat canal. A bridge carried the road across to the gatehouses looming to receive it. These gave entrance to a plain; a vast roaring marketplace; a seething mass grained with countless heads whose sluggish currents carried toy-like palanquins and the stalks of aquar heads. Skinned with crowds, the Wheel stretched off to vague distance half-darkened by the shadow of the Sacred Wall.

As he drifted slowly across the bridge, Carnelian could not help drinking in the thrill bubbling up around him. His eyes flitted from one bright face to another until they stumbled on some that looked sick and grim. In that carnival, the Marula had the faces of mummies. Only their eyes showed any life as they scrutinized the wall of Osrakum. Carnelian followed them there and he too grew troubled. Its slope filled the lower sky like a storm. The sun rising above was burning a halo round the head of the leftmost gatehouse, making its shadow fall across the bridge as a cold diagonal. Light bathed the other inner flank and spilled out onto the bridge and along the wall that carried the leftway up to the gatehouse. Its face was studded with the cypher of the five-spot quincunx. Carnelian wondered what the device might mean. His eyes slid down to where the gatehouse tenoned into the rock of the Wheel's plateau. The plateau's edge curving away in each direction was fringed with cranes that leaned over to dangle their lines into the moat. Down on its water, a barge was being poled while others were moored receiving goods from above. The moat's outer wall rose to support a cliff jigsawed together from the buildings of the city that crowded up to its edge. This cliff followed the curve of the Wheel and was boned with wood, quoined and buttressed with brick. Mouths opened here and there where sewer throats and alleys broke through to vomit their rubbish into the moat. The filth streaking down from the countless windows made them look like weeping sores.

A scratching trumpet blast made Carnelian whisk round. One of the Masters was looking up to the leftway. The trumpet shrieked louder, closer, and one of the gatehouse towers answered it with a clanging bell. When the air stopped reverberating other bells could be heard sounding from the further reaches of the Wheel.

Carnelian saw the messenger flashing past above. He searched the black huddles of the other Masters for some reaction. One of them was making signs clumsied by his gloves,… as expected. She will soon know… we are somewhere in the Wheel.

The gatehouses loomed up on either side. A double arch passed a leftway between them. One of the inner walls was snagging sunlight. Carnelian held the edges of his cowl and craned up to see that the gatehouse was sheathed with brass almost to the top. He was aghast at such profligate use of metal. The sun smouldered the wrought surface. Ledges trapped blue from the sky. Carnelian could not at first believe there could be so much metal in the world. Faces in the brass were larger than wagons, with eyes like wheels. Only when he saw the hinges, and the rollers as tall as men that lined its lower edge, did he realize that it was a gate.

He looked away and saw his wonder on other faces, but there was only fear on the faces of the Marula. They reminded him of his own misery and of the danger. The sun beat full upon their sweat-gleamed faces as they looked fixedly at Osrakum's dark wall. The focus of their terror was plain to see. Off a little to the left, the Wheel squeezed the slurry of its crowds into the funnelling canyon. Standing flanking that funnel throat were the guardians, the two Gods of the Masters, each a quarter of the height of the mountainous Sacred Wall.

Beyond the towers the carriageway fanned out to meet a cordon of toll posts. They had to wait their turn. Holding their billhooks upright, the toll-keepers looked out from under conic wooden helmets into which the five dots of the quincunx were inlaid in bone. Their leather jerkins bore the glyphs of gate and sea.

Aurum sent a Maruli forward to drop a pouch into a toll-keeper's hand. The black man then leaned back to take in the whole of their party with a gesture. Nodding, the toll-keeper emptied the pouch out and began to count the bronze, double-faced coins off against the Marula and then the Masters. While he was doing this, one of his companions nudged him and pointed up at the Maruli. The black man's face was slick with fear. The toll-keepers narrowed their eyes and began shouting at the Maruli, gesturing with their billhooks that he should dismount. The man looked back at the Masters, begging instruction; his brothers' lance blades were lifting. The billhooks were now clattering against the Maruli's saddle-chair. 'Get down!' cried one of the soldiers.

The Maruli's aquar sank to the ground and he was dragged out of the chair groaning. More toll-keepers had come up. One was barking questions. Hunched, the

Maruli slapped the man back only to find the billhooks shaking around his head. The Marula around Carnelian were growling. Nervously, he scanned the crowd beyond the toll cordon.

Aurum surged forward. The toll-keepers drew back from him, their billhooks lifting like cobras. Aurum's glove beckoned one. The man came reluctantly. The Master leant over and opened a slit in his cowl so that the man could peer in. The man's face turned to clay. As he began sagging to his knees, Aurum grabbed the billhook to hold him up. They exchanged a mutter, then the toll-keeper fled back to the others who all began nodding, almost bowing as they opened up a way and let them pass through, between the posts of brass and into the roaring crowd.

They were forced to wait while some man-drawn carts rolled by, then they swam into the shifting currents of the Wheel. A tinker clinked kettles on a branched pole that looked like a tree flocked by earthenware birds. A party of northerners lumbered past on large-headed aquar, each saddle-chair holding three or four of them, skin marbled with dirt, matted hair pebbled with amber.