“This is all we can spare for now. Use it for water and nothing else.”
Adnihilo thrust his coin before the bishop’s face. “This is it?” he rasped. “What happened to those sacks of coins you had in the chapel?”
“Supplies were expensive, Imp. Or would you rather have climbed the mountain without food and warm clothes?” Ba’al wiped the sweat from the stubble below his nose. “That’s what I thought. Now listen closely.” His voice dropped as small as the barb of a feather. “We need food, we need water, and we damned well need camels. Iisah is at least twice as far from here as we are from the Gautaman mountains, and like Hell am I going to try to walk that and back.”
“You’re not saying we’ll be here another month, are you?” blurted Adam, cradling a withered Magdalynn in his arms, remembering how long it took to raise funds in Gautama. “What if they don’t have the medicine Mags needs?”
The bishop paused a long while before he answered, “No. I don’t want to be here more than three days. I’m afraid we are running out of time.” He asked Adnihilo, “Do you remember, Imp, what Mara warned us?”
The half-blood answered a little too loudly, “Something about a black beast and some kind of prophecy.”
A few mercenary heads whipped around at the sound of Adnihilo’s words. Ba’al smiled at them through grimaced teeth till their attention turned back to the merchant’s wares. “Keep your voice down,” the clergyman seethed, “the last thing we need is to draw attention to ourselves.”
“Why?” Adam wondered, “We haven’t done anything to them.”
“Yet,” finished the half-blood.
Ba’al gave him a cocked grin. “You’re getting quick, Imp.”
Then it hit the pastor’s son all at once. “You want us to steal our supplies?” he asked, less a question, more an epithet. “These people haven’t done anything wrong. God couldn’t want us to do that. It wouldn’t be just.”
“It is if they’re Godless heathens. And how else do you expect to get the girl’s medicine in time?” Adam had no answer to that, just Magdalynn’s frail body barely clinging to life. Ba’al glanced toward the sun. “Three days, that’s all we have. After that, I’m getting our mounts, and I guarantee they’ll be on us before we make it a mile east. Until then, try to fill your packs. We meet where we entered at sun fall. I’ll have camp ready and out of sight.”
This isn’t right, thought Adam, watching his companions vanish into the crowd. He might have even shouted, but the drought in his throat hurt too much to dare. Then he remembered the coin in his hand. Water! His instincts drove him toward his basest needs, toward the nearest source he had seen—a fruit stand with bushels of limes, citrons, and tangerines. It’s tarpaulin was split yellow and green, and beneath it had been a man, and in his hand a glazed bowl pressed against his lips shimmering with water.
Any moral impulse to look away from the depravity on that brothel street was forgotten as the pastor’s son hastened back the way he came, clutching his little, silver coin, desperate for the attention of the Tsaazaari fruit vendor: a lanky, curly, burnt-brown man in shiny white silk and a lime-green turban, whose happy tongue sold fruit unflappably to the fifty-odd hands handing him an assortment of currencies Adam had never seen.
“Water!” the Messah screamed, reaching with his Mephistine silver. “Water! Water! Please!” He didn’t expect the man to understand, so when the reply came in broken Messaii, he gaped in surprise like a startled deer.
“Oi, Messah,” the vendor said, never pausing his transactions. “You want water? Come around here.” Adam assumed the man meant under the yellow-green pavilion, behind the bushels from where his business was done—at least, Adam hoped that was what he meant. The man had already taken his only coin, snatched it faster than the flash of his eyelashes.
It was a cramped space behind the bushels, well shaded, yet bare but for a carpet, stool, lockbox, and ewer of cool, crisp, delicious water. The vendor pointed out a glazed glass bowl set beside an ample gray flagon, full and ugly. “Drink,” the man said, his delighted, hooded eyes holding fast to his customers.
The Messah nodded, bowl already in hand, pouring sips for Magdalynn—each tilt a trickle she could hardly swallow—though Adam thought it a miracle that she didn’t choke. But he struggled to pour steadily while his hands were shaking, so he stole a sip for himself. The taste of honey and citrus chased down his gullet. He tended to the girl until the elixir was gone, poured another bowl from the ewer, then gulped it on his own—felt his strength return—then went back to Magdalynn. Between the two of them, they drained the flagon in the few minutes it took for their host to empty his bushels.
His last transaction done, the vendor yawned and brought a small key out from inside his sleeve. “Busy day,” he said, squatting in front of the lockbox. He stuck the key inside and gave it a quick twist. The iron chest clicked; it sprung open wide. “I close now. You want more water, you go to Hassan.”
Adam shivered at the sound of silver jingling as the man deposited the contents of his purse. A heavy clangor, coins thicker than the one he had traded away moments before, and there had to be more than a hundred. He thought of the sick girl in his arms, the rumbling of his stomach. He watched the Tsaazaari man slip the key back into his sleeve, said, “I don’t have any more money. But we’re hungry, and my sister is sick. I’m not asking for charity. I’ll work, but I don’t know where to look.”
The
