on a stroll down Tailors’ Row, where I might chat the morning away over the intricacies of patterns, stitches, and the weight and tensile strength of threads.
As I walked away from the boardinghouse, I turned over in my mind the things I had learned. The old city was ringed by an old fortress wall, and these days only families eligible to serve on the Council were allowed to own property there. East and north of the city, along the river, lay the burgeoning factory district. West lay the sprawl of residential districts like Passaporte, where Aunty Djeneba had her boardinghouse. Beyond the city lay farming country, and beyond that the border with the Taino kingdom.
I made my way seaward. The jetty was both a stony barrier between land and sea, and a long avenue running along the shore. It linked the old city with the districts that had sprouted up outside the original walls. I set my path east past the squat clock tower and toward the airship towers and the ships in the main harbor, which lay perhaps a league away. It felt good to stride. Because it was early, the heat hadn’t grown too thick.
I bound threads of magic around me, not concealing myself so much that a cart might ram into me but shifting myself into that space of things no one much notices: I was nothing more than the cobbled street, or a dog curled up in the shade of a mango tree, or a burgeoning of weeds down a disused lane where four soldiers were taking a piss against a wall.
Trolls passed in small groups and never, ever alone. Often they glanced my way as if they could sense me, but I felt it safest to ignore their glances. I sidestepped a dog-cart whose driver had not seen me, and hurried out of the way of a wagon pulled by one of those sleekly astonishing dwarf mammoths. Its stubby trunk swayed in my direction, and the trunk’s lip delicately brushed me as it lumbered past. An earthy scent washed over me. I hurried on, heart pounding.
I crossed in front of a huge boardinghouse with an open deck and bar overlooking the bay. Beside it lay a raised plaza and a batey court whose length was lined with raised stone seats in the manner of a Roman amphitheater. A team of young women was practicing. They wore sleeveless bodices and short skirts dyed green to mark their affiliation. I drifted to the side of the road so I could watch, a wistful longing rising in my heart. They were astonishingly good, bouncing the ball off legs, arms, shoulders, and even their heads and never letting it touch hands or feet, as they sought to claim a goal through stone rings.
Onlookers sat in clumps on the stone seats, watching the practice. A slender man with flame-red hair and suntanned white skin stood toward the rear among a retinue. I lost track of my breath, clenched my hands, and backed up so quickly I almost collided with five trolls. They parted around me with admirable agility. One looked at me and said, as Caith had that long-ago day in Adurnam: “Ooh! Shiny!”
I tugged the edge of the pagne over my cane. When I glanced back toward the ball court seats, seeing the man from a different angle proved him to be not Drake at all. He sauntered down the risers with a coterie milling admiringly around him. The way he carried himself, expecting a degree of deference as cold mages did in Europa, reminded me of Vai.
“Whhh!” whistled a passing woman to her companion. “Isn’t that Jonas Bonsu?”
Her friend nodded. “They say the Greens shall pay the transfer fee to get him as striker. Them Anolis shall be called fools if they let him go.”
Bold Astarte! Surely I had done enough maudlin dwelling on my own troubles today.
Ahead, the boulevard ended in the old city gate, a lofty stone arch fitted with warden’s boxes on either side and lit, even in broad daylight, with eight lamps, four on each side. Traffic flowed through the gate unimpeded, but once a warden stepped forward to question a man pushing a cart heaped with cassava. The harbor’s stone piers and wooden wharves pushed beyond the walls along the river’s wide mouth.
Before I reached the gate I turned landward into the harbor district. Densely packed with three-story buildings, this commercial district filled the gap of land between the ball court and the city walls. Alongside sailors with their rolling gait and merchants briskly about errands, I walked down a street lined with a raised walkway on each side and gaslights awaiting nightfall. I perused the streets and peered into each side lane, mapping my ground and noting signs and businesses. Down one side lane hung a weathered sign with orange letters against a feathery brown background: GODWIK AND CLUTCH.
My pulse raced. I had not quite dared hope, but Gracious Melqart had smiled on me.
Two steps led to a shaded porch and a slatted door. A bell tinkled as I pushed into a chamber fitted out with so many mirrors set at angles that I gritted my teeth. Clerks labored at sloping desks set as haphazardly as though someone had shoved them in at haste and forgotten to tidy up. All looked up from their ledgers, then bent back to work. A troll appeared from behind a screen. Approaching me, it whistled.
Its height and the muted brown of its scale-like feathers decided me. “Greetings and good morning, Maestra.”
It bared fearsome teeth in what I desperately hoped was meant to be a smile. “This way, Maestressa. Yee’s a maku, I take it?”
“I am.” I followed her behind the screen to an area with a bench, three square high platforms cushioned with pillows, and a table set with a pitcher, basin, tray with cups, and platter heaped with nuts and fruit. “How did you know?”
She chuffed, which I took as the kind of laugh you make when you suppose the other person has made an obvious joke and you wish to be polite. “How may I help yee?”
This was not going to be easy. “Are you associated with the offices of Godwik and Clutch who have branches in both Havery and Adurnam?”
Her purple crest rose. “We is.”
I stuck out my hand in the radical’s manner. “I am Catherine Bell Barahal. I have met Maester Godwik. And Chartji. And Caith. That’s why I’m here.”
“I am Keer.” No feathers covered the palm of her taloned hand. The press of her skin against mine reminded me of summer in the north, when the long sun pulls the earth’s sweat up out of warm soil.
She released my hand and indicated the table.
“That’s right,” I murmured. “Wash, drink, and eat before beginning negotiations.”
I washed and dried my hands, after which Keer washed and dried her hands and rinsed her mouth, so I went back and copied the mouth rinsing. She settled on one of the high platforms. Her height and sleek predator’s muzzle made me feel I would be at a disadvantage if I sat lower, so I hopped up onto one of the other square platforms.
Her gaze flicked to my cane. “Shiny, that.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
She flashed me a view of sharp incisors, an intimidating gesture meant, I hoped, to express amusement at my laconic answer. I desperately wanted to know how trolls, like fire mages, could see my cold steel in daylight, but I sensed this was not the time to ask. A troll came in and poured us each a cup of a fragrant tea whose bitterness made my eyes water. We drank as the serving-troll peeled and cut fruit into ceramic bowls small enough to cup in the hand, and sprinkled it with nuts.
As we ate, I looked around. The office was fitted out with interior gaslight, which I had never seen in Adurnam. Slatted windows opened into a chamber where two trolls and a man wearing ink-?covered aprons were setting type in a press. Discarded sheets of paper with uneven printing advertised a citizens’ meeting: in support of the Proposal for an Assembly composed of Representatives elected from the entire Population of Expedition.
When we had finished eating and drinking, Keer cocked her head, looking at me first with one eye, then with the other, then full on, muzzle slightly pulled back to hint at teeth within.
I found my voice. “My business is this. I need to send an urgent message to two family members in care of the Adurnam office of Godwik and Clutch. Since your office must exchange dispatches with your Europan offices, I thought I might be able to include a letter with your post.”
“Yee shall have better fortune after hurricane season.”
“Hurricane? What is that?”
“ Hurricane is the local word for cyclone. The cyclone is a violent storm which forms over water. Hurricanes rise most commonly in July, August, and September. Elsewise the ocean waters is too cool to sustain them. Therefore few ships risk the voyage to Europa until late October.”
Beyond the screen, pens scratched across paper. Late October would be too late to warn Bee. “Is there no way to send a dispatch now?”
Keer shifted her shoulders in a sliding way that struck me as quite inhuman. She said, “How met yee with
