Isern sagged back on her haunches, just like last time, and her jaw squirmed as she worried at the hole in her teeth with her tongue. “What does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” snapped Rikke, every word another stab through her head. “You already told me.”
“What did I say?”
“That she’s a witch who was sent back from the land of the dead. That she’s much loved or hated by the moon. That she lives in the High Places in a forbidden cave beside a forbidden lake. You told me we had to go and see her.”
Isern looked more and more scared with every word. Rikke never saw her look scared before. Except just before, in the vision. It made Rikke feel even more scared than the last time it happened.
“Can’t very well disagree with myself, can I?” muttered Isern.
“Do we really want help from a corpse stitched together with golden wire?” asked Rikke’s father, again.
Isern shrugged. “Help with strange problems—”
“—comes from strange people,” Rikke finished for her.
Man of the People
“Snake!” screamed a woman, and Vick recoiled, then realised it wasn’t a warning but a sales pitch. “Best snake meat!”
She waved something like a length of red rope in Tallow’s horrified face and Vick barged past, shoving people out of the way. Politeness got you nowhere in Westport. It didn’t get you far anywhere.
“Never been nowhere so busy in my life,” gasped Tallow, dodging a stringy Suljuk woman juggling gourds. Westport was always too hot but with the ovens, braziers and cook-fires of a dozen different cultures burning all around them it was stifling.
A bearded man loomed up with blades in his hands and Vick went for her pocket, but they were only skewers covered in singed lumps of meat.
“You never tasted lamb so tender!” he roared in Tallow’s face.
“Thanks, but—”
“Don’t speak if silence will do,” grunted Vick, dragging him on. “To these folk, ‘no’ is the start of a conversation. There he is.”
She caught a glimpse of Solumeo Shudra through the shimmering haze above a great pan of rice, three guards sticking close to him. Two were Styrians, big men but none too skilled by Vick’s reckoning. The third was a Southerner with busy eyes and a scarred sword through his belt. The most dangerous of the three. The most likely to move fast. But no one can be ready all the time. Especially in a crowd like this. All it would take was a moment to brush close. A quick movement of the blade. Then away into the chaos before anyone realised that the man who might’ve led Westport out of the Union was dead.
“You sure about this?” Tallow caught her by the elbow, hissing in her ear over the rattle of pans, spoons, knives, the calls of the hawkers. “Lorsen told us to leave him be.”
“If I always did what I was told I’d still be down a mine in Angland. Or dead.”
Tallow raised his brows. “Or both?”
“Probably.” She jerked her arm free and battled through a crowded archway after Shudra and his guards, into a spice-market as blinding, deafening and choking in its own way as a Valbeck mill. Baskets and barrels stood in teetering towers, shelves stacked with gleaming jars of oil. The colours were vivid in the sunlight, powders bright red, orange, yellow, leaves every shade of green and brown. Weights and coins rattled and clinked, men and women haggling in a dozen languages, screaming out that they had the best goods, the cheapest prices, the fairest measures.
Shudra was ahead, talking with one of the traders in Styrian, then with another in some Kantic tongue, switching between the two and making them both laugh, shaking their hands, clapping their shoulders. Vick pretended to look at a stall covered in sticks of incense, hardly able to breathe for their reek, keeping one eye on Shudra through the seething crowd. He scooped up a handful of bright red buds from a basket and gave them a deep sniff, beamed at the merchant as though he never smelled anything so fine.
“Man of the people, eh?” muttered Tallow.
“Very likeable,” said Vick. That’s what made him such a threat. She felt the metal in her pocket knock against her stiff hip as she turned to follow him. “But knives kill likeable men just as easily as unlikeable ones.”
“Easier, if anything.” Tallow shrugged as she glanced around at him. “The likeable ones don’t tend to be watching for it.”
A great sedan chair was heaved in front of them and Vick ducked under it, nearly knocking one of the carriers over and making the whole thing teeter, pushing on into a flood of people while the passenger screamed abuse after her.
There was a blood-curdling roar and Tallow jerked back from a cage, would’ve fallen if Vick hadn’t caught him. There was a damn tiger inside. She’d never seen one before, could hardly believe the size of it, the power of it, the weight of bright fur and muscle, twisting angrily with its huge teeth bared.
“Bloody hell,” squeaked Tallow as Vick dragged him up by one wrist. It was an animal market. A screeching, hooting, snarling menagerie. A boy shook a sad little monkey in Vick’s face and she brushed it out of her way.
“Fuck you, then!” he spat in a thick accent, and was gone among the faces.
Vick bent down, trying to catch sight of Shudra through the forest of legs, then up on tiptoe. She waved towards a rooftop. One of her hired men was on a scaffold there, pretending to work at a crumbling chimney. He caught her eye, nodded at an alley.
“This way.” Vick swung towards it, making sure not to run. Between the high buildings it was suddenly dark, slogans daubed on walls topped with rusted spikes. Eyes gleamed in doorways, watching them hurry past. A sunburned Northman slumped in a heap of rubbish shouted something, waving a bottle after them.
Down steps three at a time, fetid water splashing with each footfall, the alley so narrow Vick had to turn sideways to slip through. Chanting echoed from up ahead, then a babble of raised voices, then they burst out onto an expanse of worn paving.
The Great Temple of Westport rose up at one side, six tall turrets like the Valbeck chimneys, but capped with golden spikes rather than plumes of smoke.
Platforms were scattered in front. Stages where men and women stood in robes, in rags, festooned with talismans and beads or brandishing books and staffs. Wailing in broken voices to little crescents of curious onlookers, tearing at the air with their hands, pointing skywards with clawing fingers, eyes popping with passion and certainty, promising salvation and threatening damnation. Each insisting all the rest were frauds, and they alone were the one with all the answers.
Vick scorned them, pitied them, but underneath, well hidden, she envied them, too. Wondered what it would be like, to believe in something that much. Enough to die for it. Like Sibalt had. Like Malmer had. Like her brother had. How wonderful it must feel, to be certain. To know you stand on the right side, instead of just the winning one. But you can’t just choose to believe, can you?
“What the hell is this place?” muttered Tallow.
“Another market,” said Vick, staring around for Shudra and his men.
“What are they selling?”
“God.”
Now she saw him, gently nodding as he listened to one of the calmer prophets, his bodyguards distracted, unwary.