The Alabaster Staff Read online

  The chill wind cut through his scant clothing, but Jaldi preferred to endure an extra bit of cold over sitting any longer in that rank and foul-mouthed crowd, waiting for the chance to enter Messemprar legally. There was also the simple fact that he had no coin to pay the entry fee and thus would have to try to dodge behind the gate guards yet again. Better to dodge them on his terms, atop a darkened wall, than on theirs, at a narrow and crowded gate.

  As he neared the top of the wall, the salt-smelling wind blew unfettered by trees or refugees, and it pierced the small holes in his jersey like a spear, turning the sheen of his sweat into painful patches of cold. As he had no fat on his lithe body, he was forced to use his tongue to keep his teeth from chattering, though, thankfully, his hands remained sure as he scaled the precipice.

  Jaldi’s fingers probed the gap at the base of the topmost stones of the wall, looking for secure purchases. A bronze climbing spike, pounded into the crack between two stones centuries ago by Chessentan mercenaries, offered its pitted surface as a handhold, but, like most citizens of Unther, Jaldi felt safer relying on venerable Untheri stone. He found a cleft, brushed away the moss that had accumulated there, and pulled his head close to the top of the wall. He held the position for no little time, rolling his eyes in juvenile impatience as time seemed to slow to a stop. Soon he saw the tip of a spear, barely visible over the rampart, slowly working its way toward his position like an inverted pendulum. He ducked his head.

  The wind interfered with his hearing, so he pressed one ear to the cold stonework. Through the stone he heard the slow step of a miserable guard walking the monotonous pace of the exhausted soldier. As the noise passed his position, he hazarded a quick glance over the parapet. The guard indeed had passed, head down, shuffling along the wall.

  Jaldi pulled himself up and rolled over the battlement, dropping quietly on the inside of the waist-high stonework that gave cover to the guards on the wall. Jaldi glanced left. The guard that had just passed continued pacing his post. Glancing right, he saw the next guard, a long arrow’s shot away, just turning and starting to hobble his frigid way back toward Jaldi’s position, dark against the lightening sky.

  Jaldi scuttled crabwise to the inner side of the wall and glanced down. The interior edge of the wall’s walkway dropped into the cramped, labyrinthine streets of Messemprar. The lack of any kind of barrier or crenellations on the interior side made wall duty rather more dangerous for the guards when a storm rose, but it certainly made life easier for a roguish young interloper seeking free entry.

  He swung his legs over the wall, then flipped over to his stomach and slid down to his ribs, holding himself steady by propping himself up on his elbows. His feet searched the interior stonework for a foothold, rooting around the way a dog’s nose roots through a pile of rubbish. He glanced right and saw that the receding guard was still oblivious.

  Jaldi’s feet continued to scrabble, finding no crevices worthy of the name. He looked over his shoulder at the more distant guard to his left. As he watched, he saw the guard pause, peer forward, and straighten in surprise. If the guard yelled something, the wind caught it before it reached Jaldi’s ears, but the guard’s gesture was unmistakable. Jaldi had been seen.

  Glancing down, he saw a straw-thatched roof below him, some meager house built right up against the city’s walls. With a quick prayer to any available god that might look after petty rascals like himself, Jaldi let go his perch. As he fell, he pushed off from the wall, both to distance himself from the cold stone and to try to align his body to land as flat as possible against the sloping roof and absorb the impact of his fall.

  Jaldi landed awkwardly on the roof, jarring his head and feeling a pain shoot through his lung. He heard a crack and hoped that it was a thatching strut and not one of his ribs. He slid off the roof and dropped onto the street.

  He landed on his feet on the rough and stony ground. With a quick glance up, he saw that neither of the two closest guards could see him at the moment. As quick as a monkey, he scuttled back up the side of the house, in the corner where it met the great stone wall, and sequestered himself among the eaves, wriggling slowly and patiently into the insulating straw thatch until he was well concealed.

  He made himself as comfortable as his unusual situation would allow and hoped the grumbling of his stomach would not give him away before the guards tired of searching for one lone urchin.

  By midmorning, the city streets and markets were filled with activity. Jaldi padded through the edges of the crowd, his fast, youthful reflexes directing him through the jostling throngs like a fish through a hard current. He could feel the movements of the crowd. His years spent as an urchin had taught him to sense the mood of the people and therewith the source and probable cause of any rippling disturbance. Sometimes it was danger, as when the Mulhorandi army first marched across the River of Swords and attacked his village, but occasionally it was entertainment, as when some criminal was dragged forth and pilloried to the amusement of the public.

  Usually, though, the mood of the crowd warned him when a whip of constables was approaching, looking for little thieves like him … and receiving that warning had often kept him in possession of his hands. Untheric justice was as creative as it was cruel and thus served Jaldi both as a diversion and as a goad to excellence, for he determined that he would never be caught at his work. In his few years, he had seen tortures the like of which were unknown outside the Old Empires, punishments that the public and accused alike not only bore without comment, but prided themselves upon withstanding with great solemnity. It was the firm belief of all Untherites that the mark of a high culture was to promote at once high arts and ruthless punishment, and to appreciate both with equal aplomb.

  In that hour, however, the mood of the crowd spoke of hope. And since the Mulhorandi invasion a year and a half ago, the hope of the crowd meant one thing: food.

  Jaldi vividly remembered seeing the Green Lands get churned into mud by the armies of Mulhorand and Unther during the opening months of the campaign, when he had been pressed into service as a camp slave for his people’s army. His left triceps still bore the scar of the slave branding. When the Mulhorandi army emerged victorious, Unther lost not only its field army, but also the crops that were meant to feed the majority of its populace.

  The enemy forces had besieged and taken Unthalass, capitol of Unther, during which time Jaldi had made his escape from military duties. Since then, the Mulhorandi had driven a swarm of refugees before them. He, like many others, had fled north, pursued by the invaders until the River of Metals and Messemprar itself were all that stood between Mulhorand and the complete conquest of Unther.

  Thus Messemprar was the last refuge of the Untheri, a city bloated to thrice its natural size by the influx of fearful peasants, wounded soldiers, and desperate officials. The city’s stocks of food had run out quickly, causing everyone to feel the pangs of hunger. The raw, gnawing feeling of empty stomachs turned society’s solid foundations into greasy, treacherous slopes, and he had seen just how fast the most noble of people could fall to barbarism over a scrap of food. The hands of justice were swift these days, swift and brutal, lest defiance breed upon defiance, and all order be lost.

  These were interesting days for the young thief. Everyone was suspect, for a change, for hunger made a thief out of even the wealthiest noble, yet whereas before he might have faced a flogging for his petty theft, in these hard days he would surely be killed for stealing food.

  He glided through the crowd toward the docks, where his instinct told him the source of the crowd’s hope could be found. Most likely a merchant ship had slipped past the Mulhorandi navy and arrived with a cargo of precious foodstuffs. Though such journeys risked annihilation by the Mulhorandi, the cargo sold for exorbitant prices, purchased with Untheric iron, cloth goods, slaves, and priceless antique art. It was a seller’s market for food.

  Good living for a thief … if he could survive it.

  A throng milled at the
quay that jutted out into the Alamber Sea, where a deep-drafted merchant vessel had moored just inside the breakwater at the Long Wharf, flying a proud black pennant emblazoned with a gold Z. Stevedores, stripped to the waist but still wearing their heavy winter breeches and boots, lumbered up and down the ship’s gangway, unloading the vast cargo. The city guard had turned out in force and kept the pressing throng back, while merchants and nobles pushed forward in bids to do business with the captain. Shouts, oaths, laughter, the jingle of coin, and the thump of heavy crates and barrels being dumped on the dock filled the area with a great din.

  The crowd pressed, and Jaldi saw one of the guards waving his khopesh, a vicious sword curved inward the better to cleave naked limbs. The young thief smiled. The greater the tension between the guards and the mob, the lesser the attention for a larcenous rat like him.

  He slid past the rear of the crowd, edging his way farther out on the dock. When it became impossible to continue, he lowered himself beneath the dock, using the gaps between the ill-fitted planks for finger holds, and continued toward the ship. His feet dragged in the icy seawater, and those above occasionally trod upon his fingertips, but he was Untherite; such trials were the bread and water of his people.

  He worked his way around the edge of the dock until he was behind—and beneath—the unloaded cargo. Peering between the gaps in the planks, he located a site already piled high with crates, sacks, and barrels, and therefore concealed from the view of the guards and stevedores. He crawled back on top of the dock and pulled a small knife from his belt. With a few moments’ work he pried open the lid of a barrel filled with cured meats. Stuffing his soiled jersey as much as he could without disrupting his scrawny appearance, he replaced the pried lid and disappeared once more beneath the wooden dock.

  Two more bruised fingertips and a pair of frigid feet later, he was back on land, hiding in an alleyway and breaking his fast in as royal a fashion as he could imagine … but his thoughts kept wandering to the Jackal’s Courtyard and what awaited him at noontime.

  By midday, a chill drizzle washed over the streets of Messemprar, brushed around by the remnants of the morning’s east wind and filling the streets with the smell of winter. At the moment, Kehrsyn was warm enough. She wore a faded green long slit skirt hemmed with gold over white leggings that tucked into her nearly knee-high brown leather boots. Her heavy violet blouse was laced with a leather cord from her sternum to her throat and a bright gold sash bound it around her waist. Her hands were bare. Over everything, she wore a brown cloak with a wide hood. The quilted pattern of the inside made it look almost like a cobra’s hood when pulled up, an image she felt gave her some protection. The merchant had promised the cloak was waterproof. Unlike the merchant’s word, the cloak was better than nothing.

  She paused under an overhang before entering the square, surveying the crowd with auburn eyes. Brisk trading took place all around, precious food changed hands, along with coins and goods. The crowd was busy, but it was in a good mood. All Kehrsyn had to do was get people’s attention. Given that she’d been performing in the same spot in the Jackal’s Courtyard for a tenday, she hoped it wouldn’t be too tough.

  She didn’t know how the Jackal’s Courtyard got its name. She’d heard a jackal once stood guard over the area, though she wasn’t sure if that was a literal truth or if the large, shivered pole in the center of the square had once been surmounted by the graven image of a beast-headed god of the ancient Mulan, progenitors of Unther and Mulhorand alike.

  She pushed back her hood, pulled the collar of her cloak more closely around her neck, and stepped out into the drizzle. It would have been more comfortable to wear the hood up, but it was harder to dazzle a crowd when the people couldn’t see your face. A smile, a wink, and an air of nonchalance were all essential to her performance.

  She strode over to the great, decapitated pillar and set her small shoulder bag of props down at its base. She pulled out a small box and opened its lid, providing those of generous heart a place to gift her with a few coppers or, should she manage to charm one of the haughty nobility, a whole silver. Her rapier she kept at her side; the city was at war, overcrowded, and hungry, so it seemed only prudent.

  She looked again at the crowd. A number of people were looking at her, perhaps knowing what was to come, perhaps curious as to what the slim young woman was setting up in the center of the plaza. Here stood a small child whose tongue dabbed at the bottom of her nose, there watched a young boy trying to evade her eyes, and over there stood a cluster of guards and soldiers, no doubt speaking of her in salacious phrases.

  Feigning obliviousness to the eyes upon her, she reached up and untied her brown ponytail, hair so dark it was almost black. She fluffed her locks around her shoulders, knowing that the motion of her long hair—her mane, some called it—would draw attention. And lo! when she drew her hands out, she held a bouquet of flowers, which she brought to her nose and smelled daintily.

  She paused, savoring the scent, then glanced up beneath her eyebrows and saw that she indeed had the full attention of the soldiers, two of whom had their mouths wide open in surprise.

  The little girl with the darting tongue toddled over to her, unsteady on the rain-slicked cobbles.

  “How do do it?” she asked, her tongue still bobbing.

  Kehrsyn smiled and kneeled down, her cloak crumpling against the ground, and she asked, “Would you like to smell them?”

  The girl put her face into the parchment flowers and sniffed at the perfume fragrance.

  “ ’Mell good,” the girl proclaimed.

  “Hey,” said Kehrsyn, “you have a jewel in your ear. Did you know that?”

  The girl furrowed her brows and tugged uncertainly at one ear as her tongue once more wiped her upper lip clean.

  “Not that one,” teased Kehrsyn. “This one.”

  So saying, she reached out with her hand, gently caressed the curve of the girl’s ear, and produced a small, polished stone with the hue and grain of well-varnished wood.

  The girl squealed, “Momma! Momma, lookit my ear! Lookit she saw my ear!”

  She ran back over to her mother, holding her “jewel” aloft, stumbling on the cobbles in her glee but never quite falling. The mother turned on the child with a look of weary frustration but softened as the child’s exuberance overflowed. The child pointed back at Kehrsyn, and the woman favored Kehrsyn with a knowing look. Taking the girl by the hand, the mother put her worn purse back into her sash and strode away.

  Kehrsyn sighed and stood up again, her slender hand reaching for the hidden fold in her sash and palming another stone from the score she carried there for just that purpose. It felt good to bring some small joy to a little soul in the midst of the cold, hungry winter. She didn’t want anyone to experience the same grim childhood she’d had. Let the adults worry about the enemy that stalked the lands across the river; children needed to have their fun. So long as Kehrsyn could keep the war from stealing their innocence, she would.

  She just wished it was a little easier to get their parents to show a little charity.

  Despite her mother’s miserly demeanor, the little girl had attracted Kehrsyn some attention, just as she’d hoped. The beginnings of an audience were forming, most notable of whom were the soldiers, who walked up to her directly.

  “Olaré!” said one in greeting. “So you’re a sorceress, huh?”

  One of his mates, jealous that the other had spoken first, punched him roughly on the arm and said, “Of course not, half-wit. Where’s the aura? You ever seen a magician without a glow about her spells?”

  “Actually, yes,” said a third, a seasoned veteran and clearly the senior of the rowdy group. “It’s rare, but it’s not unknown. Why, back in Chessenta, in, uh, fifty-four I think it was, I—”

  “Come on, Sergeant,” said the first, “we hear your stories all night in the bunkhouse. I’d rather hear this maiden’s voice right now.” A murmur of general agreement settled the issue. “So, young one,�
�� he continued, addressing Kehrsyn directly, “are you a sorceress?”

  Kehrsyn chuckled and answered, “Of course not.”

  “I think she is,” commented another soldier with a smile. “She’s already charmed me.”

  Kehrsyn flushed with embarrassment.

  “So if you’re not a sorceress,” asked the first, “how can you do all that stuff without magic?”

  “It’s easier without magic,” she said, then she leaned forward toward the soldier. “It’s easy to make jewels appear,” she said in a stage whisper, “when guys like you don’t groom yourselves properly.”

  With that, she tapped at his nose, striking it so that a polished stone appeared to fly from his nostril, knocked loose by the flick of her finger.

  The soldier stepped back, too startled to know whether or not to be affronted. His comrades laughed uproariously and showered him with a variety of new nicknames, from Gemfinger to Noseminer to Rocksnot.

  The officer stepped forward, heedless that an audience had gathered.

  “You’re a gambler, aren’t you?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  “No, I—I don’t have any coin,” said Kehrsyn. “Not even a wedge.”

  “A likely story.”

  “It’s true,” protested Kehrsyn. She turned to the sparse crowd around her. “But if one of you wants to loan me a coin,” she said loudly, “I’ll pay you back double.”

  A half dozen coppers presented themselves, but she picked the lone silver egora offered by a merchant’s hand and favored the worthy with a wink and a bright, wide smile.

  “All right,” she said to the sergeant. “You see this egora, right? This side is crowns, and this side is verses. Crowns, verses. I’ll bet you this egora against one of your own. Done?”