“This is a lord from foreign parts. The whole ship is in his debt.”

  “What, Charpon in a man’s debt? Hey, you, girl-eyes, what did you do for him? I’d have said you were too tall for the master’s taste.”

  I said offhandedly to LongEye, who stood behind me, “You see the noisy one there? Go over and strike him for me.”

  Kochus cowered aside; the pirate stood nonplussed, not believing his ears, till LongEye, obeying me without expression and without a second’s delay, hit him hard in the mouth. Gold-Arm did not like this greeting and raised his meaty fist to flatten LongEye before coming on at me, while everywhere around the traffic through the hostelry halted and watched with interest. Thus I made my first impression on BarIbithni. I loosed a white energy from my palm, clear as a lightning bolt. It connected with Gold-Arm in the region of his neck and felled him like an ox. He crashed on the floor of Masrian tiles and rolled a couple of yards, woundedly roaring, while over the crowd passed that simultaneous involun-

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  tary gasping sound with which the magician comes to be familiar before he has got very far in his career.

  To augment the proceedings, all our ten Hessek sailors dropped to their knees and groveled before me, and Kochus crept near, imploring I do nothing else.

  Gold-Arm stopped rolling on the floor, and peered up in flinching amazement.

  “I had hoped to spare you that,” I said to him. “You may remember in the future that it is better to let my servant strike you than I myself.”

  A constrained hubbub broke out around the edges of the hall. Seeing I was not about to fling lightnings in indiscriminate directions, curiosity had outweighed panic. Such is the civilizing effect of city life upon men. It kills the instincts and replaces them with extended noses.

  Just then a figure came floating along the vestibule.

  Hessek by race, scented, creamed, and powdered with lips, cheeks, and earlobes tinted to the shade of fine pink coral, eyes shaped with blue kohl, hair curled and sprinkled with silver dusts. A trailing of gauze and green silk, and a pair of high-heeled slippers with tinkling disks to accompany a gliding gait like a smoothly oiled wheel running downhill. In two narrow white hands was the silver cup of welcome this pretty, mannered house offered to arrivals.

  It was so unexpected, it took my brain a moment to come up with my perception. A beautiful girl. Without breasts. And she was close enough now, offering me the cup and looking under the butterfly lids, that I could see the cat’s jaw would need shaving before the paint was put on it, for they do not castrate their boy whores in BarIbithni.

  “Drink, my lord,” said the voice, carefully schooled into a softness that gave away nothing, except that no woman was speaking. “And you, Lord Kochus, welcome to the Dolphin once again. Is lord Charpon to come later?”

  “How could he keep away?” flirted Kochus, putting his hand, with no preliminary, inside the loose draperies on the smooth, meticulously depilated flesh. “This is Thei,” he added to me, “highly recommended comfort of the inn. And this lord, Thei, is a foreigner, a sorcerer, as he has just demonstrated. Be careful the management doesn’t overcharge him, or he’ll tumble the house around your ears.” He still looked liverish with fright, despite his antics, striving to align himself with the earth-shaker, and fool the world and himself into believing his trembling was an integral part of the quake.

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  Gold-Arm had scalded off among his friends like a bull into a thicket.

  The hall hummed, and the curious Thei led us away.

  A room at the Dolphin’s Teeth. Three walls washed dark red and one lavender. Lamps in cages of leaded lavender glass hung up among bronze cages of tweeting pink and white birds, the whole ceiling a riot of light-flicker and birdflicker. A Masrian fireplace, the length ofthe second red wall-an odd affair, since worship of Masrimas means a naked flame must not be seen to burn. The faggots were invisibly lighted behind an intricate lattice of iron, which presently altered to the color of the fire, and glowed with a snapping, venomous heat through the cool city nights of early summer. In the lavender wall was a single large window with a parchment blind to let down, thereby turning the room purple. Outside, the view of a small court, orange trees, and a marble basin containing striped fish.

  In this location I sat, and gave myself over to the modish appearance of the city. Aristocrat, merchant, bandit, all looked much the same, providing they could afford it. For it was an expensive thing to be in the mode.

  They chop off the hair at the shoulder and the beard close to the jaw, and curl what remains with reedlike tongs. For the bath, they show you forty essences and recommend forty others they do not have on them. Three tailors come with garments readymade and cloths uncut, and spit and bicker between themselves, and the jeweler slinks up and produces a silver collar, two hands broad and with lion epaulets, which you have reason to suspect has been recently around the neck of some pirate-prince just now sent to be measured for a piece of rope instead.

  At length the noon meal is brought in, and you discover platters full of gilded stewed seafood with raisin stones among quinces, and miniature joints that turn out to be baked shrews and their gods-know-what besides, and tall thimbles of black koois, the rum of the south. Everything, in short, that such luxury-loving sharks as Charpon might desire.

  These novelties so far came as a flamboyant credit, extended to each of Charpon’s officers. Where I was to pay in cash, I borrowed from Kochus, who accepted every fresh excursion into his coffers as insurance against my wrath.

  In the early afternoon Charpon presented himself, having turned meantime into as much of a dandy as I had, and with his cropped pate covered by a wig of blue-black curls.

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  “I hear you’re sending my men on your business, sir,” he said. He looked me over, taking in the New World elegance, “And spending freely on my credit.”

  “Lord Vazkor has been using my money, Charpon,” cried Kochus, anxious to show loyalty to both his dangerous superiors.

  “Charpon,” I said, “if you wish to dissociate yourself from me, get out.”

  “You are aware, sir, that I am as much your slave as any of my Hessek rabble. I am only surprised, after your treatment at my hands, that you let me live.”

  “I have no wish to kill a man without cause,” I said. Through his eyes I saw pass, under the layer of caution and unstruggling surrender, the contempt for my supposed ethics and my lack of years, which even my sorcery had not cured him of.

  I had had sixteen days as the Vineyard sailed and I lived gratis in Charpon’s ship-house-sixteen days to formulate my plans. Which were simple enough. If my bitch-dam was here in the south, as my sense of precognition led me to believe, I would need funds and cunning to seek her. For sure she had hidden herself. Talk with the sailors had not revealed any notion of her; clearly she had not elevated herself to a position of influence, as in Ezlann when she was my father’s wife. Supposing her here, she might even have lost herself hi some backwater of BarIbithni itself. It seemed to me one way to flush her out was to make a stir, in my father’s name. I meant to become the sorcerer and healer Vazkor, and I meant to amass some wealth, too, putting my alarming gifts to work for me. With sufficient reputation and coin, my investigations could be facile. If she fled, or if I failed to come on her, I must simply cast the net more widely.

  2

  Charpon dismissed, I went out into the dove-wing heat of the city, which in late summer would swelter into a furnace. The Amber Road continues from the Market of the World along the western side of Hragon’s Wall, that bastion which

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  divides the aristocratic portion of the metropolis from the vulgar.

  BarIbithni was four cities. Its hub was the vast commercial area of port, docks, and markets, which clambered into suburbs across the uplands in the south. Beyond Hragon’s inner wall lay the fortified citadel on a natural hill called the Pillar, a military edifice situated within two square miles of bronze-faced outer battlements, and capable of accommodating seventeen jerds, somewhere in the region of seventeen thousand men. Away from the Pillar, to the east, stretched the Palm Quarter, its terraces of gargantuan temples and lotus mansions culminating in the Heavenly City, inaccessible to most-the Emperor’s stronghold.

  Meantime, beyond a tract of marsh far to the west, where it had formed like a scum around the ancient and abandoned docks, was all that remained of Old Hessek BitHessee (popularly known as the RatHole), a warren of slums worse than any that clotted the outskirts of the New Capital. Half underground, frequently fever-ridden, dark as dusk at noon and pitchblack by night, no man, warrior, or imbecile visited there unless it would cost his life to stay away.

  Amber Road ended near Winged Horse Gate, the main entrance through Hragon’s Wall to the Palm Quarter. Here, on the west side of the wall, the fashionable part of the commercial area began, squares with fountains and stucco houses with painted columns, and the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias. To the Grove those with the time to idle come at this hour of the day, to parade up and down the smooth lawns, and breathe in the perfume of dusty, full-blown magnolia blossom, while conjurers performed tricks and caged beasts roared in arbors.

  As Kochus and I, with the usual precautionary band of accompanying roughnecks, strolled up the street to the Grove, Lyo sprang out on us from a shadow.

  “Lord Vazkor,” he said urgently to me, speaking in his own Seemase tongue, which only I could entirely follow, “there shall be three.”

  While I had lounged in the hostelry, Charpon’s Hesseks had been about the town, on my orders, to spread word of the sorcerer. (My dealings with Gold-Arm the pirate had probably found their own voice) Lyo, however, I had sent with a man who knew the undercurrents of BarIbithni, to inquire after those sick in need of an extravagant cure.

  “Three,” I said. “Good.”

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  He grinned; he had been running around on my errandSj pleased with the sound chest he now had.

  “It’s to be this way, Lauwyess. An old woman will approach you on the second lawn, selling sweets from a tray. She will stumble and fall in your path, crying out loudly so everyone can hear. She is well known and has a crippled spine, though she panders to it in order to win sympathy.”

  “Will she, then, not object to being healed?”

  “Ah no, Lauwyess. She says if you are magician enough to do it, she will be able to exhibit herself as your handiwork, and get more coins than ever. She asks”-he grinned again-“if you could not make her young again, too.”

  “And how much did she cost us?”

  He pursed his mouth.

  “My apologies, Kochus,” I said. “Tell me the rest, Lyo.”

  “Once you have worked the miracle for her, another will come, a young man known to be blind in both eyes-he is the youngest son of the merchant Kecham, but his father cast him off when he would go live with a strumpet, and now the strumpet is the only one who cares for him. She will bring him on the cue, but she is worse than the old sweet-seller, wanted three pieces of silver for it, for she lacks faith. She will see. When that is done and the boy’s eyes healed, Lauwyess, the crowd should be primed. But to be sure, I have passed the word among the gate porters of Phoonlin’s house-he is rich, half-Marsian, and superstitious, and his wife gossips with the maids and is more superstitious even than he. He has a rock near his bladder that is nearly killing him with the pain. He has called on priest-healers before, of the Masrian temples, and of the Old Faith, too, so I hear. If he knows there is a magician in the Magnolia Grove, he will go to discover. Then, after a wonder or two, he will throw himself down before you and beg.”

  “You did well,” I said. My other errand boy had by now come up, and Kochus paid them both without demur. We crossed Winged Horse Square and went through the old wall of the Grove, which had been a Hessek garden a hundredodd years earlier.

  The lawns rose in four levels, flecked with pink magnolia shade and dotted with pools. A fine spice of dust smoked from the winding paths where the merchants and their like went up and down.

  There were few women on display. It was basic to Hessek morality that the female is a jewel best kept in a box. Ladies

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  might venture out with their husbands only under cover of darkness, and then veiled from the nose to the ankle. Even the poorer women, of necessity abroad, covered half their faces and all their forms in this manner; only the Masrian girls went bare-faced, but they were mostly over in the Palm Quarter. Commercial BarIbithni was a hotbed of mixed blood, Old and New, and though the men put on the draped breeches and the airs of Masrians, they preferred their women in the old style, safely tethered. But there was a predominance of masculine courtesans of Thei’s ilk. More than once, before I grew accustomed to it, my eye was caught by something too much a girl to be one.

  On the second lawn a red tiger was pacing about its post in an open enclosure above the path, staring with practiced hatred at the crowd of fools who patronized it. A single weak link in its alcum shackle would have meant a different game.

  Kochus said, “She’s coming, the old woman. Over there. I’ve seen her before, Lellih the crook-back.”

  I turned and looked for her. She would recognize me, from some description Lyo would have given her. Her hair was uncovered, gray and sparse, and her eyes sewed up in snarls of skin, but she also had hidden her lower face with a bit of a veil. She was tiny, shrunk little even for a Hessek, and her back rested over her like a small broken mountain. The wicker tray that she wheeled before her on a solitary wooden wheel was loaded with delicate confectionery that seemed to mock her unsightliness.

  She got within a couple of yards of me, calling in a thin wail for custom. Then I realized why she had demanded money, for part of her act was to be that all her trade of sweets be spilled, for dramatic effect, at my feet. As the sugar gems rolled, Lellih swung herself awkwardly down, flopped over in the grass, and began to shrill with a ghastly, damaged anguish.

  The idling crowd drew aside, alarmed by the proximity of this distress. Kochus, unable to restrain his mirth at the play, had begun to chuckle, tillI warned him to be silent.

  A figure ran over, somebody’s drab, thin female servant, who presumably knew the old woman. She crouched down by her, trying to take her arm.

  I walked to where Lellih was folded on the lawn, screaming, and the servant girl stared up from dull eyes, and cried, “Don’t harm her, sir. She can’t help herself. She’ll be better in a moment, see if she isn’t.” She spoke in faulty Masrian

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  for my special benefit, I supposed. I was of Masrian height and tanned very dark, and in my fashionable gear I probably seemed to be of pure conqueror-blood.

  “I don’t intend to harm her, girl. If this is Lellih the sweet-seller, I mean to heal her.”

  The servant gaped; the crowd around us hovered. Only one man laughed, catching my words. Lellih of the crooked back, meanwhile, turned her bird’s head and squinted at me with an eldritch wickedness.

  “How can you heal me?” she asked, having got it pat from Lyo, and managing besides to make her squeaking heard a fair distance. “All my years I have carried the gods’ curse on my shoulders.”

  I bent and lifted her up. She was like a wisp of brittle-dry straw, ready to flare alight in the heat of the day. Her head came no higher than my belt.

  “Don’t mock me, my fine lovely lad,” she shrilled out. “How can you heal a cripple who has been bent in a hoop since she was birthed?” Under her breath she maliciously added for me alone, “And just let’s see you do it, for all your boasting, you devil out of Hessu’s sea.”

  “Hush, granny,” I said softly. I put my right hand flat on her spine and my left under her chin, and I straightened her, as I might straighten a stick of green wood.

  I had felt little or nothing the other times. This time I felt a surge come out of my palms, and she screamed aloud once, in earnest, and her twisted spine crackled like cinders underfoot. Then she was upright, her burden gone and her rags hanging hollow on her back, and now her head reached to my rib cage.

  The crowd made its sound.

  The servant girl hid her already three-quarters-hidden face.

  It was Lellih who turned up her predatory eyes and said, “Is it as it seems? Is it? The pain went through me like redhot whips, but now I am straight as a maid. Say, handsome priest-fellow, will you make me young, too?” She glinted at me, sly as a gray fox. “I was a fair sight when I was young, saving my hump, truly fair I was. Will you do it?”

  My flesh crept, as it had for a moment when Lyo first told me her words. If I could do that, pare off age, remake youth, that was a vision indeed to catch fame. But I was not sure. It seemed a thing no man, magician or priest, should aim at half unholy. It got me superstitious, where I was not, to think of it I said, nevertheless, and very quietly, “You’ve had your

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  medicine for today; besides, I work no miracles without ultimate profit, granny-girl. If I did what you ask, you’d be my tame monkey thereafter, part of my sorcerer’s credentials, a peepshow; I waste nothing of my work.”