Quick or dead. This is the Eel
Queen's Law, and all children who run in the streets of the city know
it by heart. Or else they are dead. Mari knows the law. She will
be ten soon, and she has not yet been caught. By Resplendent
Orchid's standards this is an accomplishment of great moment. She
has worked for thiefmasters, for tanners, for fullers and hadrosaur
stables, has stolen fruit, jewelry, meat, bread, coin, even candies
from the stalls of the Golden Cabal. She is small, light-fingered,
an acolyte from birth of the Eel Queen and her art. Now she sits in
a the crowded attic of a flophouse with a dozen other ragged
children, wondering what tempted her inside to listen to the woman in
yellow.
The Woman is young, ten or eleven
years older than Mari at the most, and she is so pale she looks like
the invalids who beg outside the temples at the center of town. Blue
veins run like rivers beneath her papery skin, surround her yellow
eyes like the fractured shadow of a noblewoman's mask. Her hair is
long and black, pooling on the floor around her, and bells made of
many metals adorn her trailing sleeves. Kneeling before the
children, light from the window at her back breaking over her, she
looks like a consumptive angel. She makes a slow, deliberate wai,
and Mari echoes it at once. It is always best to be polite with
alchemists.
Once, she has heard, a Grandmaster of the Iron Cabal
turned his boy-whore into salt for spitting on his slippers.
“Welcome,”
says the woman in yellow.
Mari says nothing,
and neither do the other children. They all know the laws. Never
speak first, never steal from a thief, never flaunt your take. The
list goes on. She does not speak; she listens.
The woman in
yellow laces her fingers together, the bells on her sleeves jingling.
“Who knows who rules your city from the great fortress on the
hill?”
“Claude de
Scorier,” says some idiot, a gaunt boy with a harelip. “He lives
in Resplendent Orchid with his sons.”
The woman smiles a
thin, sharp smile like a knife's edge. “Correct. How would you
like to own everything that Claude de Scorier owns?”
The smell of greed
is sharp in the air. Mari feels it, too, the forbidden goal of
wealth, real wealth and not just cold survival. She knows better
than to trust it, though, and she swallows her lust. There is
nothing but betrayal behind smiles, nothing but disappointment behind
promises. If you wanted something, you had to take it yourself.
“He sleeps on
silken sheets,” says the woman. She has her audience in the palms
of her pale, slim hands. She knows it. “His galluses eat better
than you ever have. How much injustice have you choked down since
your births? How much more will be force-fed to you?” She reaches
into her sleeve and produces a flat obsidian coin impressed with the
Shogun's glowering visage. A koku. Enough money to buy food for two
months. More money than any child in the room has ever held at once,
and certainly more than any of them has ever earned through hard
labor.
“What do you
want?” says another child, a squat, flat-faced girl with shrewd
eyes and scars on the backs of her hands. Mari thinks she has seen
her before, out on the streets some night by the Green Kitchens or
begging in the Plaza of Contempt.
“I want
nothing,” says the woman in yellow, “but the Hollow God desires
all, and it is Their will I serve. Tell me, will you help me kill
your Daimyo?”
de Scorier has
knights at his command, swaggering bullies with ko-flags
displaying their made-up ancestries to the whole world. He has the
city guard, rough men and women paid just little enough that they
must extort and brutalize everyone beneath them. Worst of all,
though, he has the Sad Men. de Scorier is not to be toyed with,
especially not by half-starved children. Still, Mari is tempted.
The room waits, holding its breath. Mari bites her lip. What to do,
what to do.
“I will,” says
the boy with the harelip. His voice is a drawn-out snivel, wet and
cringing.
The others join
in, each clamoring to be heard above the others, all proclaiming
their skills as hardened killers. Mari watches in silent disgust.
She knows the other children are lying, and even as the woman in
yellow explains her brazen plan she is caught up in their twitching
faces, their covetous eyes and the flush in their gaunt cheeks. Do
they understand nothing? Soon they're leaving, filing out through
the narrow door, coins clutched fast in their sweaty palms. Mari
rises and moves to follow, eager to leave the stuffy attic and its
strange inhabitant.
The woman's voice
freezes Mari where she stands. “Wait, child.”
Mari looks back at
the woman, still kneeling in the light that pours in through the
dusty window. “Magistra?” she says, her throat suddenly dry.
“Most of them
will take my coin and try to sell me to the city guard,” says the
woman in yellow. She seems unconcerned. The footsteps of the other
children are already retreating down the winding stair, heralded by
creaks and groans. “Not you. Why?”
Mari swallows.
“The guards don't listen to children.”
“Still, you
might have had the coin.”
“Where would I
spend it? The merchants would call me a thief.”
The woman nods.
She runs a hand through her long black hair. “Yes. Many of the
others will die. You knew my gift was poisoned.”
“Poisoned?”
Mari trembles, thinking of how she nearly took the coin.
“Figuratively.
What urchin could have a koku who had not stolen it?”
Mari says nothing.
The woman's pale yellow eyes, the color of piss or cornflowers,
frighten her. She wants to go, to run back to the streets and see if
Ugly Ursula has work for her in the stables behind her inn, the Red
Dimetrodon. Still, she does not move.
“The rest are
chaff,” says the woman in yellow. “You may be worth something.
Help me and I can promise an acolyte's place for you in the Iron
Cabal.”
Mari's chest
tightens. The Iron Cabal, those sellers of slaves and soldiers,
beholden not even to the Shogun but only to the Lich King and the
Dead Senate. It is said that the alchemists of the Iron Cabal give
up their souls when they take up their posts, that they wield powers
no other alchemist could dream of. In the woman's offer is a
lifetime of, if not ease, then at least security. Privilege. Power.
Mari swallows, wipes her damp palms on her trousers. “What do you
want? Really?”
The woman in
yellow smiles, showing her teeth this time. “Something beautiful.”
Mari is pretty cool (nice to have a young jaded character and a clever thief besides), but the Woman in Yellow is the one that really interests me.
ReplyDeletePlus I continue to enjoy the combination of French and Japanese culture.