Street Magic

Chapter Eleven




The next morning Briar and Evvy went to Princes' Heights to fetch her cats. Wearing racks that supported covered straw baskets, Briar and Evvy passed through the entrance to her part of the Heights, a black stone arch that some wit had named Sunrise Gate. It opened onto a broad tunnel into the rock. Briar looked around as Evvy led the way: he could see wood and stone shoring everywhere. Part of the tunnel roof was covered by a wooden ceiling. In places the wooden planks had fallen; heaps of stone and dirt lay under them.

"Don't you worry about cave-ins?" he asked.

Evvy shrugged. "They happen all the time. Nobody thinks much about it."

Briar shuddered and decided he wouldn't ask any more questions.

In the wider tunnels the air was reasonably fresh. Shafts cut through into open air above, creating a breeze. It carried a rich bouquet of scents: wood smoke, burned food, rancid oil, burning fat, mildew, and rot.

Leaving the large tunnel, they turned into a smaller one, then a third. Now serious odors flooded Briar's sensitive nose. The jelly-thick reek of too many people in a space for much too long a time made his eyes water. The stone itself had absorbed years of old urine and dung, cookfires, blood, cheap food, and death.

Briar was gasping as they entered their fifth tunnel. His nose had stopped up completely. Tears flooded down his cheeks. The light thrown off by a few torches and burning knots of wood or manure showed air filled with a gray haze.

He stopped to rearrange his burden, settling the rack lower on his shoulders. The roof was not very high in the depths. "How can you bear it?" he asked Evvy.

She frowned, confused. "Bear what?"

"The smell!"

Evvy shrugged. "I don't smell anything." She raised her flat-ended nose and sniffed. "Oh, all right, somebody was cooking goat last night. Don't you like goat?"

A heap of rags by the wall cackled and turned into an old woman who struggled to sit up. "You live here long enough, my lad, and you won't smell nothin' either. Got anything for an old lady, Evumeimei?"

Evvy knelt by the old woman. "Maybe I do." She pulled two rolls from her pocket: they looked suspiciously like some of the ones Rosethorn had bought for breakfast. "Qinling, chew careful," she cautioned.

"Don't go worrying about me," Qinling replied. She gnawed a roll eagerly.

Evvy walked on. "I'll miss Qinling," she murmured just loud enough for Briar to hear. "She's the only one who speaks Zhanzou with me."

"What's za – what you said?" he asked, wiping his dripping eyes on his sleeve.

"Zhanzou. The language we spoke in my province. Qinling tells me stories in it sometimes, if she's not too drunk. This is Lambing Tunnel, what we're on." She led him around a turn.

Briar stopped and looked back for a moment, trying to tell if they were followed. They had passed doors and windows on the way, openings barred with wood, rags, or even bead curtains. He'd sensed people behind those barriers, peering at them, sizing them up. He half-expected them to follow, like starving rats. Flexing his hands, he realized his wrist daggers had dropped out of their sheaths and into his palms. He kept them there. All along he'd felt less and less plant life as roots on the ground overhead reached their limits. There would be no calling on plants for help in this sunless place. Only mold grew down here, and mold wasn't much good in a fight, though he supposed he could use it to make attackers sneeze themselves blind. He hadn't felt so naked of friends in years.

Evvy stopped in front of a shallow niche formed by one chunk of stone overlapping another. She rested her forehead against the stone, her back to Briar. "I know he's a stranger, but he's a good stranger," she murmured to the stone. "He'd never hurt me. He's my teacher. He's safe."

Briar shook his head – his foster-sisters would laugh themselves sick to hear him called a teacher. He still felt not like someone who deserved the title, but an imposter. Once we get her a proper teacher, she'll know I'm not one at all, he told himself. If that idea pinched him a little, it was overtaken by shock. What he'd thought was a shallow niche was really a passage. How had he seen a wall there?

I'm starting to think the rock hides my squat, she'd said yesterday.

She was right.

Briar followed her into the narrow passage. It was just wide enough to admit them and the baskets they carried on their backs, though Briar had to crouch to keep from banging his head. Ten yards down they began to climb steps so old they were worn like bowls in the middle.

"I think there was a cave-in, long ago," Evvy remarked quietly. "It sealed off my place in front. This was the back way, originally." She passed through an opening at the top of the stair to be greeted with a chorus of yowls. Briar sneezed: the aroma of cat urine blended with the funk of the passage. He didn't even try to blow his nose. The worst thing he could imagine just now was a nose clear enough to smell everything afresh.

Evvy's home was a two-room chamber carved in orange stone. The light was better than it had been in any of the tunnels. It shone steadily from five opaque or cloudy white crystals that were sunk into the stone of the walls.

At first it seemed as if the floor crawled with cats. They meowed and twitched their tails as they mobbed the girl, who knelt to pet each one. A second look sorted them out. There were indeed seven, all as thin as Evvy. They came in a mixed bag of colors: blue-gray with apricot patches, brown-black with orange patches, two brown masks and feet with gold fur, two cinnamon masks and feet with gold fur, black-and-white. Evvy crooned and handed out the contents of a cloth bag she'd pulled from the front of her tunic: chunks of beef and what looked very much like half of the breakfast ham.

Briar inspected their surroundings while Evvy tended her friends. A pile of rags in the corner seemed to be her bed. Directly under a hole in the ceiling was a rough fire pit, with a bucket and a battered pot beside it. A collection of cracked and chipped pottery was stacked by the wall. In a niche he saw a much-battered god figure: a smiling fat man with shriveled flowers at his feet. A thick coat of cat hair covered everything. A ripe drift of scent from the other room told him it served Evvy and her cats as a privy.

The most remarkable thing about the place was the walls. In some areas the rock had been planed smooth, though enough chunks had fallen out that the effect was irregular. That he expected. What he hadn't expected was the stones embedded everywhere, small ones the size of a dav, others the size of his palm, even some polished rounds and eggs that were probably stolen. Their color and texture varied. One thing was the same for all: They had been pressed into the wall as if it were soft butter, not stone. Briar tried to pry one out, and couldn't.

"You put these in?" he asked Evvy as the chorus of yowls quieted and the cats ate.

She nodded. "Ria, let Mystery have that. You have your own," she chided the black-and-white cat. "I thought maybe it's just dirt, the walls, and that's why I could push them in."

Briar rapped the wall around one stone and grimaced. "It's rock, Evvy. You made the rock act squishy."

She shrugged. "I didn't think it was anything special when I did it." She ducked her head suddenly. When she spoke, her voice was wry. "Though I stopped after I kept getting headaches. I think the Heights were telling me, enough, please."

Briar surveyed the room again, hands in his pockets. "Can we take some of these back with us?" he asked. "Including your light-stones. We'll look them up in the books, find out what they are and what-all you can do with them."

Evvy scratched her head. "Right." She scrabbled in the rags of her bed, drawing out a large section of cloth. Once she had laid it flat, she began to pry various stones from the walls. They came easily for her. When Briar tried it, they remained stuck fast.

"What I don't see is how we're taking the cats," Evvy commented as she placed stones on her cloth. "There's ways out of here they can use once we start try loading them, you know."

"Don't you get rats through those ways?" Briar asked. He placed Evvy's basket and the two that he had fetched on the floor and opened the lids.

"No rats," Evvy said firmly. "The cats gang up on them. They let the rats get in and then jump 'em." She bent to scratch the nearest cat's chin. "They're good friends to me." Her lower lip trembled. "I don't want to leave them."

"Girls. Always fussing," Briar said. "Leave it to me."

The cats finished devouring their food and started a post-feeding wash. Briar slid an oilcloth packet from his shirt pocket and opened it to reveal three catnip leaves. He placed one leaf in each open basket, then woke the power in them. To feline noses it was as if a huge bed of fresh catnip had sprouted in the baskets. They scrambled to get at it.

The moment two cats were in each of the small baskets and three in the largest, Briar closed the lids and fastened them. He lashed one to the rack Evvy would carry, then put the remaining two on his. Once they were set, he changed the power of the leaves to make the cats sleepy. The baskets rocked as the occupants curled up for naps.

"How did you do that?" Evvy wanted to know, awe in her wide brown eyes. "Can you teach me?"

"Not with catnip," Briar replied with a grin. "Maybe us rock-killers are good for something after all."

Evvy blushed, grinned, and flapped a hand at him. She wouldn't say he was wrong, but she wouldn't admit he might be right.

"Hurry up with the stones," Briar ordered. "I have to see Lady Zenadia to deliver her tree, don't forget."

Evvy tied her rag bundle shut. She had left only one stone in the wall, to light their way out of the room. The others shone through her cloth, rays of light poking like fingers through openings and holes. "I'll have to wash before we go." She tied the rock bundle to her waist and let Briar settle her rack on her shoulders.

"You're not coming," he said, securing the ties. "I'm going by myself."

Evvy scowled at him. "Why can't I?" she asked. "She said I could. I'd like to see a takamer house."

"Not this one," Briar said firmly, checking the bindings on his baskets. "She might just try to keep you and give you to the Vipers. Better not to risk it." When she opened her mouth to argue further, he said, "You wanted me for a teacher. That means you have to listen. If you don't like it, I'm sure Jebilu Stoneslicer would let his student visit any takamer's house in town, carrying messages and such-like."

"No he wouldn't," grumbled Evvy. "He'd put me under a bushel basket and send a cobra in to keep me company." She pried her final lightstone from the wall, then led the way out, holding the stone up like a lamp. They had re-entered Lambing Tunnel and passed the lump of rags that was Qinling before Evvy remarked, "You thought me living in the takameri's house would be good yesterday."

Is this how parents live? Briar thought a bit wildly, as frustrated by his own lack of answers as he was her questions. Do kids go on asking the same questions even after the answers change? Do they question everything out of a person's mouth? "I changed my mind," he retorted.

"So you don't want me to work for her. And you don't want me to join the Vipers. And you're sure this time."

"Right," Briar said flatly. "Exactly right." I think, he added to himself.

It was close to midday by the time Briar was able to set out for Lady Zenadia's home. He bought food and ate on horseback rather than lose more of the day. He was starting to feel a little scraped and brittle. It was time to work on his trees, to brew medicines and weed the rooftop plants, before he forgot who he really was in all this running around.

Before that, he had a larch to install. It took five people to direct him through the maze of the city and into the less maze-like, but still confusing, web of streets that made up the monied parts of town. At last he came to Attaneh Road in the part of Chammur called the Jeweled Crescent. These homes were notable for their large gardens, the wealthy flaunting their spacious residences. The city's oldest families lived here, those who grabbed the best land between the heights and the river when they finally spilled out of their rocky fastnesses.

He knew better than to enter through the front gate. He'd learned early that the rich viewed mages not so much as honored guests but as very expensive servants. Instead he rode to the tradesman's entrance and told his business to a blank-faced man-at-arms. Once he passed through the gate, he was met by a chamberlain who guided him through winding galleries, halls, and courtyards.

Briar cast an expert's eye over the gardens they passed through: like many houses in the east, it included small gardens within the larger one that wrapped around the house. Each of the small gardens was laid out to create certain moods. He was impressed by what he saw. Lady Zenadia's gardeners knew the futility of trying to create too many lush, green spaces in so dry a climate. There were green oases, miniature water falls and ponds, but they were carefully tucked into corners to shelter them from Chammur's dry, hot winds. The remaining gardens held a rich variety of desert and hot country plants, showing the bountiful life that flourished in country most people thought of as wasteland.

Passing along part of the garden that encircled the house, Briar paused. Some of these trees and shrubs were gleefully vigorous, pulsing with strength. What would do that? Surely the gardeners didn't fertilize with fish heads – fresh fish was a costly delicacy in this water-poor country. Offal, perhaps, or animal leavings, chopped fine and mixed with normal fertilizers? He would have liked to ask the gardeners, but the chamberlain was tugging his arm.

Briar hesitated, curious still. What are they feeding you? he asked the fruit trees by the rear wall. What have they put in your earth to make you so alive?

Good food, they chorused, leaves fluttering. Rich food!

Briar sighed. How could he expect trees to know what went into the dirt around their roots? He was trying to formulate another question when the larch complained. They were in direct sunlight and the miniature was already dry so it could be drawn easily from its present earth to be repotted. The larch wanted Briar to stop talking to these great, overgrown plants and tend to it.

Briar shook his head and followed the chamberlain. Clad all in white – white breeches, white shirt, white turban – but for his green overrobe and sand-colored sash, the man seemed like a ghost. Only near the end of their walk did he speak. "Will you require anything of the house, pahan?”

"Only a pitcher of water," Briar replied, shifting the weight of his saddlebags on one shoulder. They contained his tools, as well as a selection of pots in various colors. He never knew ahead of time what colors were in a house – bringing a variety solved more problems than it created, even if it did make for a heavier load. The tree was cradled in his other arm; with it he carried a bag of fresh soil.

The man bowed him into yet another open gallery. This one opened onto a green garden, a pocket oasis with a fountain at its heart. Briar laid a hand on the stone wall that ran around the gallery at waist height. He had a dish that would go nicely with the green-veined black rock that formed it and the columns that supported the roof here. Placing the larch here would ensure that it got sunlight while still being somewhat sheltered from the hard winds that swept the city from time to time. "Shaihun's Breath," they were called; they snatched moisture from any surface they touched.

Briar found the dish to match the setting and placed it on the wall, checking it on either side. There was no need to build a shelf to support it, as the wall was the right width. That was a relief. He'd spent time in Winding Circle's carpentry barns, but he still preferred not to have to cut and hammer wood if he could help it.

He placed the larch in its carry-box on the wall and began to lay out his tools. Clearing his mind of the many plant-voices from the garden, he began to layer compost in the dish to prepare it for the new occupant.

That done, he asked the larch to free its roots from its soil. The tree obeyed, glowing in his mind with resignation: he had repotted it twice before. While it didn't care for the process, it knew fresh earth and the change of space would feel good once it was settled. No tree liked to be lifted free of its dirt, but Briar's trees, old and new, trusted him to make the operation fairly painless.

He was inspecting the roots for any sign of blight or damage when he heard Lady Zenadia's voice. "Pahan Briar, so this is where you got to!"

I'm to think you didn't order your servants to bring me here? Briar wondered, turning to bow to the lady. Servants padded into the garden to set a long chair, a table, and two upright chairs on the tiles. Lady Zenadia, majestic in dark red top and bronze silk wrap, reclined on the long chair when it was ready, crossing her sandaled feet before her. Servants moved to adjust the pillows that propped her up; another servant poured three cups full of some dark liquid; a maid put out bowls of fruit and napkins. One of their number took position behind the lady with a long-handled fan of cloudy white feathers.

Her companion, to Briar's vexation, was Jebilu Stoneslicer. The fat stone mage, trying to conceal a pout, sat in an upright chair. He wore dark green silk today, heavy at the hems of his tunic and leggings with gold embroidery. A constellation of jeweled rings winked from his plump fingers. Once settled, he placed a napkin on his lap. He did not begin to eat; instead he occupied himself with finger-pressing the fine linen into thin pleats.

"Where is your assistant, Pahan Briar?" Lady Zenadia inquired, her heavy brows knit. "That dear child Evumeimei. I had wished to see her again. I did invite her."

The lady appeared out of sorts, Briar thought. Too bad. "She's home, settling in," he replied, returning to the larch's roots. "She doesn't know anything about miniatures, anyway."

"That is the bunjingi form, is it not?" inquired Jebilu. "The calligraphy form?"

Briar was impressed. Not everyone knew the correct names of different miniature shapes. "Quite right, Master Stoneslicer," he said. "Do you study miniature trees?"

Jebilu sniffed. "In the imperial court of Yanjing, where I lived for a time, those who did not know the forms were considered untutored barbarians. I was forced to learn, to appear to advantage at tree-viewing parties."

"This talk of trees is all very well," the lady remarked sharply, "but I particularly desired to speak of Evumeimei, Pahan Briar. Surely you know that she cannot receive a proper education under the roof of a green mage who is young himself. And surely you have better things to do than instruct a young girl."

Briar carefully trimmed a few roots. "I don't understand my lady's meaning," he murmured, thinking, She's like a terrier with a favorite toy. How can I make her let go of all this about Evvy?

"I mean that Chammur must offer many distractions to a handsome young man," the lady said, delicately peeling an orange. "Unless our young women have gone blind. Bring your Evumeimei to my house. Master Jebilu has agreed that he may have been overhasty in his dealings with her. He has offered to teach her while she is under my protection. I will see to it that she is fed, clothed, and educated properly."

Briar looked from her to Jebilu. The stone mage busied himself with carefully sipping the contents of his cup, blotting his lips dry after each sip. He refused to look at Briar. She muscled him somehow, Briar realized, and he's scared of her. "I think there's been a misunderstanding, my lady," he said, returning to his inspection of tree roots. "Evvy won't study with Master Stoneslicer. Her mind is made up."

Lady Zenadia chuckled warmly, real amusement in her voice. "My dear pahan, if nothing else betrays your youth, this does! Young girls cannot be allowed to order their own fates! They have neither the experience nor the fixedness of purpose of their elders. This is why I would be more fit to undertake her education. I have raised three daughters, and each married well. Once Evumeimei is under my roof, her childish attempts to order her life, rather than to fit obediently into her proper place, will end. She will thank us both for that, one day."

The bleakness of the vision – of the life – she had just proposed made Briar's breath catch in his throat. She wants to break Evvy to the rein like a, a horse, he realized, suddenly furious. Battling his temper, knowing he would kick himself for it later if he opened his mouth now, he rested the larch on its original earth and met the woman's large, dark eyes squarely. "My lady, if you bought this tree because you thought I would force Evvy to live with you in exchange, I'd better take it home," he said, his voice flat. "She's settled with my teacher, Pahan Rosethorn, and me. We're headed to Yanjing in the long run, and we're going to take Evvy back to her home province when we do." They'd discussed no such plan, but Briar thought it might give this high-and-mighty pair an excuse to back off before things got truly ugly.

Lady Zenadia sat up straight and planted her feet on the ground. Bracing her hands on her thighs, she asked in a cold, chilly voice, "Do you think to defy me, boy?”

Briar didn't even blink under her hard stare. "Shall I take the larch home, my lady?" he inquired, rather than answer so foolish a question. Of course he was defying her. He would do it with pleasure and an overturning of all her carefully raked and planted greenery, if it came to that. It was time she learned that people who came from poorer homes were not toys to play with.

Moments that felt endless passed as she silently tried to break his gray-green gaze with her dark one. Jebilu actually shrank back in his chair. Finally the lady flapped a hand in disgust. "No. I have purchased that tree, and I will keep it."

For a single copper dav he would have taken the larch home anyway, but caution stopped him. Whatever he might think of Lady Zenadia and her dealings with humans, she had very fine gardeners. They would tend his tree well. No doubt she would even hire another miniature tree expert to serve only her. Also, he had made the bargain, and registered the sale with the keepers of the souk. He didn't want to get a reputation for bad dealing.

A black silk purse had appeared on the wall beside the larch. Briar opened it and counted its contents, aware that Jebilu and Lady Zenadia watched him. All of the money was there. He poured out the coins and put them into his bags, leaving the silk purse empty. He wanted nothing of this female other than his rightful payment. He bowed to the lady and to Jebilu, then walked away.

On the way out, he stopped once more at the arch that offered the best view of the big garden, looking at its plants and trees with a careful eye. There was freshly turned earth near the bases of two trees, a prickly juniper and a short-leafed cedar, he saw.

What do they feed you? he asked them silently. What makes you grow so well in such tired ground?

They still had no words for it. Briar shook his head wearily and followed his guide to the servants' gate.