and the huge slave. Everyone must stop to stare at beauty as it passed.
The red cap slid sideways to the side of the thoroughfare as, far up ahead, the company stopped at a merchant's stall. From within the crowd, he could not see what the merchant was selling, but then the object she held in her hand caught sunlight and flashed.
Mirrors, for the vain to stare at their pretty faces.
The beggar loitered. Keshad glanced at Chaji and Umar, and they nodded. Very suspicious!
The company moved on, the black-clad soldiers opening a wedge through the crowd not so much by forcing it as by simply being there. For a moment, the crowd thinned in just such a pattern that he saw her lustrous black hair arranged in a complicated set of falls held up by combs and hairsticks. She was speaking to the captain, laughter in the lift of her chin.
He was not a fool. Compared with the Qin captain, he could be of no interest to her. He didn't even want anything from her anyway. It's just she was clever and lovely and close at hand to stare at, when his heart was already torn in half and thrown to the wild beasts to savage because he had lost his sister and his purpose in life in one dreadful change of fortune. Because Nasia, the slave-woman who had been his lover, had stared at him with recrimination in her face, even as he told Mai to turn Nasia away from her only hope of freedom.
'Lost him,' said Chaji as he shoved Keshad to get him moving.
'There he is,' said Umar, behind them. 'Beyond the gold awning.'
As they cut past noodle shops, the singsong of the flirting ladle girls drifted alongside appealing smells: 'hot and spicy! for the rains!', 'best qual-i-ty, best qual-i-ty', 'mushrooms and leeks, here's your mushrooms and leeks'. At a plank table, two men chopped radishes and purple-heart; over a brazier, a girl slip-fried them with pipe-shoots and salt in smoky sesame oil.
Chaji grabbed his elbow. 'There's Chief Tuvi, walking rear guard. Get moving.'
The larger party was walking up the shoemaker's lane, the long way around to the district where the Silvers lived if you didn't know the city as well as Keshad did. But the beggar's red cap moved past the shoemaker's lane and cut up the tailor's lane, so they climbed after him, pretending at intervals to look at fancily embroidered festival jackets selling cheap because in the wake of the attack the city had not mustered a festival this year.
'The captain is actually the half-brother of the Sirniakan emperor?' Kesh asked.
Chaji gave a curt shake of his head, which meant Keshad had stepped out of bounds by asking an inappropriate question, and kept walking.
'Lost him,' said Umar. 'Hu! There he is.'
They hurried through the bone-carvers' alley, in shadow under canvas slung between buildings. The carvings were polished to such a high gleam that they seemed alive in the dim light: winged horses, dancing lions, writhing salamanders, swimming dragons. Hugging the corner, they ventured onto a wider street. Uphill, Chief Tuvi's broad shoulders vanished around a sharp turn where the street split into three. A red cap slouched behind a pair of matrons.
'There,' said Umar, starting forward, but Chaji caught him by the tunic and tugged him short as a barrow filled with bricks rumbled by, pushed by a sweating man wearing a linen kilt and an unlaced sleeveless vest flapping back from his torso.
'He's working with a second man,' said Chaji. 'That one with a rag tied around his left arm, standing beneath the green awning, behind the rack of sandals. He's seen us.'
'The hells!' swore Keshad. 'Two of them!'
'Maybe more. Where are Seren and Tarn? Why haven't they caught up with the captain? It isn't like he's moving fast.'
A whistle blasted above the street noise. Chaji bolted, Umar at his heels, shoving past anyone in their way as they sprinted after the company. Keshad found his way blocked by the barrow-man, who was swearing as he struggled to stop the unbalanced barrow from spilling. Kesh grabbed the lip and pulled, and the man thumped it down on its legs with a curse.
'Sheh! Cursed outlanders!'
The red cap bobbed past, flowing downhill. Keshad pushed past the same pair of well-dressed matrons and followed the cap down the street. The beggar ducked behind passers-by, then twisted into an alley. Kesh sprinted after him, but negotiating the confines of the alley of combs was not so easy because the artisans recognized him, Master Feden's household having spent a good deal of coin on fancy combs and lacquered sticks and clasps. A small girl seated with legs dangling from a second story balcony watched his progress, her round face solemn as she tracked him.
Panting, he came out into the tailor's street. He scanned up the angling terraced steps and down toward the sprawl of the outer city seen through gaps in buildings. A red cap bobbed in the crowd, then stilled as the man stopped and looked back.
To make sure he was being followed.
Aui!'
Although similar in stature, this was a different man. He wore a subtly different twist of dirty kilted rags and had less of a bandylegged gait, a man who had spent less time on horseback than the first beggar. Now that Kesh thought of it, where did a beggar get bandy legs from riding horses so much, unless he was an outcast fosterling raised and later discarded by the lendings?
Where had they lost track of the first beggar? It could have been at any time after Avisha had tossed a vey in the man's bowl. Maybe down by the gold awning amid the clamor and slurp of the noodle stalls. Easy enough to slide one red cap in the place of another.
'Guards! Murder! Murder!'
The red-capped head was still turned to watch him, and Keshad knew absolutely that to run down past that man would be idiotic. He plunged back into the alley of the combs and halted in front of the stall of a woman he'd dealt with a hundred times.
'Where's your mistress?' he asked the lad overseeing the wares. 'Mistress Para!'
She was an attractive woman, her taloos wrapped around advanced pregnancy. But she was remarkably light on her feet as she emerged onto the porch with a cup in one hand and a tiny chisel in the other. 'Keshad!' She smiled. 'I heard you left the city.'
'Heya! My apologies. Can I cut through your house to the alley behind?' Beyond the bright opening of the alley, traffic passed on the tailor's street.
She was Air-touched like him; it gave them a measure of kinship. She stepped aside, and he sprang up the steps in his outdoor shoes and raced through the workshop while a pair of apprentices paused in their work to gape. He ran down the long corridor that fronted the living quarters. Emerging finally in the narrow kitchen yard, he pelted through an open gate into the fetid confines of the back alley.
He cut back toward the tailor's street and hurried down the terraced steps toward the commotion below, where men were still shouting for the guard. He hadn't meant to cut so close to the incident, but when he saw Seren leaning against a wall, holding his side as though injured, he shoved through the traffic and fetched up beside the young soldier, who was red-faced, breathing raggedly, and doubled over, barely able to keep his feet.
He didn't touch him. 'What happened?'
Seren was vomiting, his face gray with pain. The hand he had clutched to his stomach was slick with blood.
Beyond a gold awning where fry-ups were sizzling ran an exceeding narrow walk between three-story buildings, accounting houses
topped by apartments. A young militia man appeared in the gap. Seeing Kesh, he beckoned him over.
'Weren't you one of the Master Feden's slaves? Aren't you hired now by the outlanders? Best you come see.'
Back here the buildings were a maze, walkways barely wide enough to let a barrow pass. They turned a right corner, then a left, and in the center of a stone drainage ditch awash in spilling sewage and flowing blood lay the other Qin soldier, Tarn.
He was dead.
