Last First Snow (24 page)

“We fought,” she said, and stopped. “I fought, that is, because people were trying to kill me, and I would be dead now if I let them succeed. You were young, then. I think the young fight for different reasons, or tell themselves they do.”

“Kopil is wrong,” Elayne said. “He's hurting himself, and the city.”

“No Craft this court can offer will bend him to your will.”

“Then I'll find another way.”

She thought she kept her voice neutral, but there must have been something naked in it. The judge reached out to her. “Elayne—”

But she was gone.

 

38

The first night of the riot was the hardest. Temoc lay awake in bed with Mina beside him, also awake, neither speaking. Sun set over the camp, and for the first time in weeks he was not there to celebrate it. Hungry gods murmured in his skull. They slept, though restless. He did not.

He rose, and walked the halls in boxer shorts. No lanterns lit his way, only the soft glow of streetlights through the windows. Eleven years ago they'd moved to these few rooms—small compared to the palatial chambers of his far-gone youth, but after his drunken wandering days the house seemed a paradise. At first he'd resisted moving into slave's quarters, but he grew to love the Skittersill as he grew to know its people: hard honest folk oppressed by crooks.

He sat on an iron chair outside. Metal chilled his back and legs. The clouds boiled and writhed like crowds mashing against barricades. To the northwest, they glowed red—lit by Chakal Square fires?

The door opened. She bent to kiss his temple. “I love you.” Meaning: I'm glad you came home.

“I love you, too.” Meaning: I'm not sure.

“You did the right thing.”

“I know.”

“You could go. If you wanted. I can—” She broke off with a sudden ragged breath. “I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to say that just because I want to hear it.”

“Go back, then. Throw yourself into that—whatever that is.”

“I want to be here, with you.”

“Don't lie.”

He stood and faced her, a single movement faster than he'd meant. His heart beat racehorse fast, as if he'd sprinted a mile. “I'm not lying.”

“If you think I'm holding you back, I can deal with that. But I need you to be honest with me.”

“I left good people there.” He lowered his voice. Don't wake the neighbors, they might think there was something wrong. Hilarious. Absurd. He did not laugh. “But I can't be in the movement and out of it at once, you understand? If I went back, I'd live and die with them.”

“Take us with you,” she said, but he heard the slight catch before “us.”

“You could survive it. Caleb? There are enough children stuck in this thing already. And if I leave you both alone the King in Red will take you hostage, or worse. So on the one hand I have my people, and on the other my wife, my son who I never taught to fight because I thought, in this modern age, he did not need to know. And … I love you. I want to be here.” He meant to set his hand on the table, but misjudged his own strength and struck it instead. “I wish there were two of me. I wish there were a million. And then the others would go right the wrongs of the world, and I would stay. I promised to stand beside you. I will not break that vow.”

The city could be so quiet after dark. Wind blew over tile roofs and brushed vine against vine. A carriage passed outside their house. Her nightdress shifted against her legs. “I couldn't handle a million husbands. One is my limit. So don't go getting any ideas.”

He looked down, saw himself, laughed. “I am not wise enough to make these choices. Choosing leaves a wound, and the wound scabs. When I wonder if I've made the right choice, I peel back the scab to look.” He mimed ripping open a scar on the inside of his forearm, and she made a twisted face. “When I was Caleb's age, the priests marked me to bear the burdens of the gods. I expected to fight demons from beyond the sky. I should not need so much strength to refrain from fighting.”

“This isn't a refrain.”

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“Come to bed.”

“I won't sleep.”

“Me neither. But at least we won't sleep together.”

*   *   *

The next morning he had to walk two miles before he found a stocked grocery store. The market was mobbed but the streets were almost empty. Unnerving. Dresediel Lex was a city of wide avenues. Even the Skittersill, labyrinthine by comparison to other districts, sported streets any other city would call broad. Most days traffic glutted these, but this was not most days. Streetsweeper zombies shuffled along, their occupation gone: no excrement to clean, no dust to remove.

Temoc stopped outside his house to scan the
Times
he'd bought with the groceries. The front page was an etching of Chakal Square. The artist drew architectural features in painstaking detail but rendered humans as a single featureless mass. Temoc grunted when he read the headline: “Skittersill Rising.” It suggested a war between the people of the Skittersill and of Dresediel Lex, as if these people were not the same; it implicated everyone in the Skittersill in the Chakal Square violence. Perhaps he should find the journalist, correct him. But he, Temoc, did not speak for the movement anymore. He was not their master, not even their priest. Just a private citizen reading the news.

The
Times
devoted more space to the riots than they ever had to the peaceful movement. Of course. Violence sold. No mention of Tan Batac, just “a man injured in the initial outburst.” Nothing about an assassin. The story focused on the mother and her bloody child, and the Warden's thrown rock. Even there, the
Times
shied from the truth. “In the confusion.” “Self-defense.”

“It's bad to read on the sidewalk,” Elayne Kevarian said. “Someone might run into you.”

He did not jump. She stood before him, dressed in charcoal gray, hands in pockets. He had not heard her approach. “I wondered if you would come.”

“I wondered if you would leave the Square. Happy surprises for us both.”

“Happy,” he echoed.

“Go to the King in Red, Temoc. Stop this.”

“I am not sure,” he said, “that we are talking about the same King in Red. The … man … I saw yesterday did not want to stop the fighting.”

“He'll listen if you sue for peace.”

“Beg, you mean. And if I succeed, what then? Return to Chakal Square to announce that though I abandoned them, I have dealt on their behalf?”

“If you make a good deal, they will honor it.”

“Any bargain I strike would be a coward's compromise.”

“The King in Red wants to win,” she said. “Give him a personal victory over you, and you might be surprised how much he'll surrender in return.”

“I will not show him that force will make me bend. I will not show my people that we should stand up for ourselves only until a sword is drawn.”

“There's no shame in peace,” she said.

“There's no shame in general peace. Each specific peace holds its own.” He dropped the newspaper in a trash can. “I want to help, Elayne. I wanted to fight, but I left. I denied the King in Red a target. For that, my fathers turn their faces from me. I can bear their disappointment. But I will not kneel to the man who killed my gods.”

“You'll let Chel and the Kemals and everyone in that square suffer for your pride.”

“They made their decisions. I made mine. I survived. That was what you asked of me.”

“Fine,” she said.

“I have to go.” He lifted his grocery bag. “Before the meat spoils.”

“Take care of yourself, Temoc. And of them.”

“I will.” He turned from her, and walked inside to his family. She left in a shimmer of insect wings.

They did no work that day. They kept windows closed. Mina set her notes and books aside. They played go fish, and gin rummy, and xaltoc, and a variant on Fight-the-Landlord, which Mina won. Temoc asked Caleb about school, and Caleb told stories of his classmates, and some of the stories were true. At two in the afternoon, their windows rattled and water rippled in their glasses. Caleb ran outside, and Temoc and Mina followed him. Couatl flew west overhead in V formation. Talons glinted in the sun. Temoc's grip tightened on Caleb's arm. He did not notice until the boy squirmed and he let him go.

Smoke stained the western sky.

They waited. After a while, they made dinner.

All along, in Temoc's mind, the city burned.

 

39

The smoke north of Chakal Square was black as the inside of a mouth, and thick. Sharp winds parted it like curtains to reveal buildings burning. Glass in a high window shattered and shards fell into the inferno. Heat surrounded Chel. The curtain closed again and night returned, swirling and absolute.

“Who sets a godsdamn building on fire in the middle of a heat wave?”

Tay, beside her, shook his head. “The Major's people?”

“I'll open him like a tin can.”

A large man barreled toward them out of the darkness; Chel jerked Tay to one side and the runner swept past. Screams rose with the smoke. She recognized one voice: “Gather close!”

The Major. “Come on.”

She choked on smoke, and so did Tay. The crowd thinned as they ran north. Most of those still standing were the Major's troops, their faces smeared with ash.

The Major stood among his followers, armored despite the heat. His men crouched around him like sprinters, grim and tense, aimed toward the flames that consumed tents and buildings at the Square's northern edge. “Charge!”

“Hells' he doing?”

“I have no idea.”

The Major and his people sprinted toward the blaze. Chel tried to follow, but could only guess their paths in the billowing black. Smoke scraped her eyes.

Shapes approached: inhuman silhouettes first, red-lit lurching ghosts, many-armed and triple-backed. No. Not ghosts. Human beings: the Major's people returning. They bore others across their backs, wrapped their arms around limping women and unconscious men, old and young alike, hobbling out of the fire.

The Major came last, slower than the rest. One man over his left shoulder, a woman under his right arm. His armor glowed in places, and not with sorcery.

They helped him: Chel took the fainted woman, and Tay the man, and together they ran for safety, or at least for air.

They found an empty space to set the wounded down. The Major knelt. His armor pinged and hissed as it cooled, and the man inside that armor hissed too, from pain. He could speak, though his voice was tight: “Thank you.”

“What happened?”

“A camp near the northern border. One of the tents caught first.” The Major pressed his gloved hands against the ground, but could not force himself to his feet. “Or maybe the buildings caught first, I don't know. Bad luck either way.”

“You didn't do this?”

“What kind of person do you think I am?”

She didn't answer that question.

“My people are in the fire, helping those who can't escape. Where are yours?”

“Getting folks out of the border zone,” she said. “Breaking down camps to keep this from spreading.”

He panted. “And the others?”

“Wardens are pressing on the eastern front. The Kemals' people ran to the Skittersill for supplies. Bandages. Medicine.”

“The resource war,” he said, and she heard his scorn.

“Their medicine will save lives.”

The Major heaved himself to his feet, and staggered north.

“Where are you going?”

“Back in.” The smoke parted again. Flames shone off his homemade armor. “Come with me if you'd like.”

Then he was gone.

“Dammit.” She stood. Tay grabbed her hand. She pulled away, but he didn't let go. “If there are people there—”

“We go together.”

“Fine.”

They ran north into a foreign hell.

*   *   *

The next several hours melted into a slag of memory: heat and sweat and heavy breath through wet cloth, the weight of unconscious human beings, gods!—flesh could drag you down—straining muscle and the sting of hot metal against skin. She coughed ash and spat black. Shouted directions. Cried for aid. Unfamiliar faces took shape from the smoke, a new pantheon of gods and saviors forged in this dark hour.

Someone contained the northern blaze: Wardens, maybe, or the fire department. Tents near the border burned until they scarred the stone beneath.

When the camp was safe, Chel and Tay collapsed side by side. Neither spoke at first. Breathing was enough. Somewhere, the fight continued. Wardens circled, wingbeats heavy.

“We can't do this,” Chel said. “Not alone.”

“We did it,” Tay replied.

“This time. Things will only get worse—the Major saying the Kemals let people die, the Kemals claiming he set the fire. And we still have our hostages.”

“Who do you think started it?”

“I don't care. We need to pull together, and we can't do that alone.”

Tay's hand fell onto her stomach. She held it in silence. Overhead, smoke and sorcerers' clouds closed out the stars.

 

40

The next day Temoc took a stroll.

He told Mina he was going to the store, which was true, but he took the long way round, toward Chakal Square.

He didn't enter the Square, so it wasn't even a lie of omission. He just drew close enough to hear the crowd.

The city was dead. Trash lay discarded in gutters. Airbuses and civilian traffic had deserted the sky. Only Couatl swooped above, so high up they seemed small as birds. In darkened shop windows decal monsters advertised new low prices. Chicken breast, six thaums a pound. New cheap combo platter.

Faith and hunger drew him like gravity. Though the sidewalk lay flat beneath his feet, walking toward the Square he felt as if he walked downhill.