CHAPTER FOUR
SHAA OUT OF PRACTICE
Zalzyn Shaa fled east, having left Drest Klaaver just ahead of the squad bearing orders for his arrest on a charge of practicing medicine without a license. Shaa’s skills as a physician were not in question. His license, however, had been issued by the preceding government, which had left power abruptly and without advance notice. Shaa had been relaxing in his lodgings at the back of his consulting room, his feet up on an ottoman, browsing through a recent case digest from the Imperial Conclave of Physicians, when the former Chief of Police had arrived to request his services. The former Chief of Police had made this request by the simple expedient of launching himself through a window from the street, demolishing Shaa’s coat rack, and collapsing onto the rug, bleeding profusely and (Shaa determined quickly) in a fairly terminal fashion. Shaa, estimating the consequences of being associated, in even such a circumstantial manner, with the losing side in a power grab, had quickly liquidated his practice and packed his tools and light valuables on the former Chief of Police’s horse, which he appropriated in lieu of other payment for his services. He rode swiftly through the Bridegroom Gate at the west end of the city, made a wide detour through the northern agricultural district, and headed east for the river.
Pursuit, as Shaa had expected, was not significant, the new government undoubtedly having better ways to squander its resources than bringing down players of no conceivable worth to anyone but themselves, especially those with the bad taste not to present themselves neatly for incarceration. Shaa wasn’t too upset about his strategic departure. He had discovered early in his apprenticeship that medicine, exercised with whole-minded diligence and without a leavening of other projects, offered something less than comprehensive satisfaction. As a result, Shaa’s professional history tended toward bouts of medical practice interspersed with abrupt career shifts. He had been established in Drest Klaaver for almost three years - leavened, it was true, by several significant episodes of mortal peril – but for him this amounted to virtual stagnation. It had been time for a change, he reflected, and a new taste of the open road.
The road was clear, the surrounding ground cultivated and gently rolling, and it was spring to boot. The clear air was full with the smell of young grass, turned earth, and the occasional cow. Small towns and hamlets came and went. Shaa rode patiently, doing calisthenics in the mornings and working out with his rapier at noon, appreciating just how well his shattered tibia and assorted sesamoids had come back together without even the trace of a limp. By the time Roosing Oolvaya and the mist of the river appeared on the horizon, Shaa felt ready for them.
Some of the peasants and townspeople Shaa had spoken to as he neared the city had told him rumors of growing unrest and political instability. The tales hadn’t bothered him much - Roosing Oolvaya was always in a state of unrest, and instability was something of a local custom. Still, as the sprawling district that had overgrown and then surrounded the city walls grew nearer, it became apparent that actual checkpoints had been set up and patrols were on the roads. Smoke from several fires hung in oily nets above the city.
A permanent bazaar of tents and stalls and cut-rate stableyards for caravans lined the shoulders of the major west road, but no structures intruded on the roadbed itself. There was traffic in both directions. Farmers and their carts predominated, but a trickle of refugees headed outward as well. Shaa watched faces as the former Chief of Police’s horse ambled on. Amid the soil-rooted and weather-gouged stolidity of the farmers and the city-honed craftiness of the residents was a mixture of hues, creases, shapes, and statures from places further afield; all human, but not without their human share of diversity. The cosmopolitan air was certainly not unusual in a district given over to itinerants and traders, quick deals and quick fights, but the typically boisterous and surging character of the place was subdued. A general feeling of wariness lay atop everyone’s features.
Well, Shaa thought, that is fine with me. Whenever something broke, one kind of person left (or hid in the cellar) and another kind of person showed up. He had been both, at one time or another. At the moment he felt like the kind that showed up. Of course, he was out of practice.
The western gate drew up and the militia on duty waved him through. Shaa found a stable a short distance inside and left off the horse, shouldering the saddlebags, and walked on, checking his bearings and reassuring himself that he could still get around in the city. There had been no recent floods, so there was little danger of civic renewal substantially changing things. The next block - ah. He turned into an alley. The alley, scarcely wide enough for a large person, narrowed further, its protruding second-story balconies drooping to within head-cracking range, then wound to the right and suddenly terminated after an abrupt twist to the left again at a closet-sized cul-de-sac surrounded by blank three-story walls. Several ferns protruded from the dusty ground. Shaa parted the leaves, revealing a grating. He wrestled the grating to one side and stretched an arm down into the shaft, feeling along the facing stones. The first stone was solid, as was the second, and the third – but then the third stone tingled suddenly against his hand and wobbled under his touch. Excellent, it was still keyed to him. He pulled the now-loose stone free, exposing a recess in the wall. Ah, Shaa thought again. Quite satisfying.
Rummaging through the saddlebags, Shaa selected a sack of supplies and a pile of assorted implements, which he secreted about his person. The saddlebags fit neatly into the gap in the grating shaft. He slid the stone into its slot and the grating into its frame and started back along the alley. Two twists before the exit to the street, Shaa heard a muffled thud from around the bend in front of him, as that of a head encountering a low-hanging balcony, followed by a whispered but scathing curse. Letting his cloak fall back, Shaa reached across his body and grasped the hilt of the rapier on his hip. A young man in a red and yellow tunic stepped around the corner, rubbing his forehead with one hand and waving a long blade with the other.
“Yes?” Shaa said.
The man looked up, startled, his eyes snapped to Shaa’s shoulder, where Shaa was now not carrying his saddlebags, his eyes narrowed as a look of avarice appeared on the face around them, and he turned the point of his blade toward Shaa. Shaa brought his own point up as he lunged. Shaa visualized his blade puncturing the right ventricle and severing the descending aorta, but he had decided to be lenient. He was, after all, a physician, and that did involve certain oaths and a particular underlying philosophy, no matter that they might prove inconvenient from time to time. The man beat ineffectually as Shaa’s sword punched through his right biceps and neatly withdrew. The bravo staggered back against the wall, his own blade dropping from his fingers and his other hand clasping his wound, and sank slowly to the ground. His mouth made an open astonished circle. Shaa stepped over his legs and continued toward the exit.
As Shaa reentered the street, a small pack of dogs appeared going the other way, back into the alley. “Ah,” Shaa said again, inclining his head pleasantly at them. “My compliments.” The last dog nodded back, and Shaa strolled off into the city.
The old part of Roosing Oolvaya was a cramped place, constrained by the shapes of the city walls and the crabbed windings of the narrow streets. Even in the bazaars and business districts the crowds were sparse. People looked over their shoulders and walked lightly, keeping watch for mercenaries, the militia, and the Guard. Some stores were closed, many with boards thrown up and rudely nailed across doors and shattered windows, while other stores and buildings had been sacked and burned. Smashed merchandise lay trampled on the cobblestones.
Several times Shaa encountered bands of armed men marching freely through the streets. They wore armbands showing an unfamiliar rune that looked, to Shaa, roughly like a flaming purple pretzel. Shaa was not accosted, though some of the troopers eyed him expectantly and fingered their swords. It was still early in the afternoon, the day was pleasant, and tempers were comparatively mild, though, so it appeared that the different forces were not yet spoiling for trouble.
Shaa wandered in a roughly eastward direction with his ears open for news. Finally the street he was on took a sharp zag and unexpectedly opened onto the Boulevard of the Fifth Great Flood. The Boulevard, much wider and with a much more lively atmosphere than the earlier streets, was the center of the waterfront entertainment district. Muggy breezes from the docks and wharves five blocks east rolled in sluggish currents toward the rest of the city. Equally muggy sailors off the river barges were rolled in along with then. Shaa stepped around three mariners snoring in a happy pile at the intersection and ambled down the Boulevard.
Most of the entertainers had removed themselves from the street, although a number leaned from second-story windows, surveying the traffic and making an occasional proposition. Shaa checked them over with a professional eye. He had spent time on the Boulevard. Aside from his long-standing fondness for the Fifth Great Flood, he had once combined a part-time job as Waterfront Health Inspector and Tariff-Collector with a fairly lucrative smuggling racket.
During Shaa’s walk, curfew notices had begun appearing around the city. Shaa, along with most of the population, had no intention of actually staying indoors, but he decided he might as well put his feet up for a bit and see if the world would provide anything interesting for free, or at least with a minimum of investment. Shaa was known to make house calls, and he didn’t see why the world should be less particular. He ran through his memories of the local inns. The Wyvern’s Fodder had been his favorite in Roosing Oolvaya, but it was near the north wall, at least a half-hour’s walk away. Hmm … he had once spent productive time at - what was that place?
As it turned out, the place was the Bilious Gnome, and it was only two blocks north. The inn was embedded in the ground floor of a three-story building constructed in the classical Roosing Oolvaya style. The lower two floors were relatively utilitarian, with prominent hardwood beams meeting at right angles to frame and support the whitewashed facade. The upper floor, though, was a general riot of overhanging, protruding, and rippling timbers zigzagging and colliding in clever patterns, leaving the overall impression of a trestle bridge filled in with patches of plaster. Egg-shaped and squared-off windows of different sizes occupied the larger spaces between the timbers. Because of the haphazard layout of the beams, all the windows for each story were not on the same level. In fact, the curving windows with their rippling glass seemed to bounce and bound all up and down the walls. Although the views from some of the lower windows on each story could only be appreciated when you were lying on the floor, conversely affording passers-by in the street a sight of the feet and legs within, Shaa thought the net effect was rather artistic, at least when the street was wide enough to stand back and appreciate it. Unfortunately, the streets rarely were that generous, with the characteristic overhang of the upper stories making the viewing situation even worse.
By Roosing Oolvaya standards, the building housing the Bilious Gnome was unremarkable. A chipped signboard hanging out over the Boulevard showed the portrait of a yellowish gnome, his pointy ears wilting. Shaa gave it a nod, pushed open the door beneath the sign, and went in.
Circles and ovals of light from the street lit up the walls. Shaa planted himself in a corner on a long bench with a view of the door and rested his elbows on the wood slab table. The bar behind him divided the customers from the bottles and kegs. From the other end of the common room, a staircase led upward, disappearing out of sight behind an alcove. A half-dozen other early patrons drank or talked quietly, while a kettle slurped in the low flame of the hearth.
The innkeeper appeared and supplied a mug. Shaa traced figures in the wet circles on the table, wondering if the world really would give him a hand and toss him something useful. It had happened before: he had a reputation for luck which, after all, was attested to by the fact that he was still alive. He stared absently through one of the front windows and onto the street. Yellowish streaks and a formation of large bubbles in the glass rippled in the declining sunlight. Glassmaking, Shaa recalled, was a highly profitable industry in Roosing Oolvaya, but not because the glassmakers were very good at what they did. The technical processes of making glass were fairly much frozen at their current level, bubbles and all, but somehow the glassmakers had managed to turn flaws and pockmarks and irregular colors into something approaching an art form. It was one of the best solutions to working within the god-mandated limits on technology Shaa had ever seen.
During his tenure in Waterfront Health, Shaa had somehow ended up as part owner of a glass shop. He tried to remember what had become of it. On this visit, perhaps he would hunt up his former business manager and figure out just how much of the city his investments had by now left him owning. Across the Boulevard, a trio of itinerant musicians had planted themselves in a clear spot against the wall of a spice merchant. They finished unpacking their equipment, a set of hides stretched taut around nested helices of wood and bone, and prepared to rhythmically strike the hides with ivory paddles. Over the noise of the street traffic and the insulating quality of the Bilious Gnome, Shaa could hear nothing of the trio as they tuned up. That was fine with him; he was not a fan of country music. For some reason, though, his absent gaze kept returning to them.
Having arranged each other to their mutual satisfaction, the three men raised their paddles. Out of a narrow alley just to their left ran a panting young man, a boy really, his hair wild and his manner frantic. The boy hesitated, wobbling as he checked his momentum and glanced around for a new direction to run. His gaze locked on the musicians as their paddles descended. Even through the distortion of the window glass Shaa saw a look of desperate shock appear on the boy’s f ace as he suddenly recognized an imminent doom. The boy spun around in a convulsive swirl. The paddles came down and began to pound, and the boy jerked to an abrupt stop in mid-turn. His arms flopped to his sides, he sagged, the energy and the animation seemed to flow out of him into the ground. In a way anyone without Shaa’s understanding of the mechanisms that kept the world on its track might have called blind chance, the boy’s face came to rest in a pristine splinter of immaculately coherent glass, his eyes meeting Shaa’s across the street and window and common room. The face was slack; the eyes had rolled up, showing the scleral white of oblivion.
Shaa straightened. His face lit. “Ah!” he said. He bounced to his feet, ran through the door and into the street, elbowed aside an enticingly dressed young woman and the heavily whiskered riverboat man who had his hand on her hip, and reached the boy at the mouth of the alley. The boy had started to sag limply to the ground. Shaa pinched him on the bridge of the nose, quite hard. The boy failed to react; his eyes neither moved nor blinked. “Ah,” Shaa said again. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders, lifted him partly off the ground, and started toward the Bilious Gnome. A hand reached in from the side and closed on the front of Shaa’s cloak. “Not so fast, huh,” said the whiskered sailor, his voice muffled by the underbrush covering his face. “What d’yer think yer doing, shoving me around, me and my, friend, here?”
“My apologies,” Shaa said. “My friend is not well.”
The sailor looked suspiciously at them. “Not the plague, i’n it?”
“There are many plagues,” Shaa said. “Who can say?”
The sailor looked at the young woman, then straightened himself and stuck out his chin. “Plague or no plague, what I go to do, I should take yer face and -”
Shaa looked at the young woman himself and raised his eyebrow suggestively. She obligingly canted one hip and nudged the sailor. The sailor followed Shaa’s look, the young woman batted her eyelashes, and the sailor’s grip loosened and fell away. Shaa quickly reentered the Bilious Gnome, dragging his floppy companion. The thump-twang of the paddle trio faded as Shaa kicked the door closed. Shaa dropped his burden on a bench, resting the boy’s head on the table, and resumed his own seat across the table from him.
The boy stirred, his head twitched, and then he pulled himself up and looked around, blinking his eyes.
“My name is Shaa,” said Shaa. “I am a physician.”
The boy’s gaze focused on Shaa and turned wary. Shaa, with some charity, estimated the kid’s age as fourteen. “Where are we? You better not try to bleed me.”
Shaa raised an eyebrow. “Certainly not. Do you take me for a barbarian?”
“You said you were a physician.” The kid shook his head, trying to clear it.
“Well struck,” Shaa said. “Although I practice medicine, I do so with discretion. Allow me to emphasize the element of discretion, and your present degree of relative safety in having been removed from the street.”
“The street -” The kid tensed, spun around to stare through the window, then spun back. “What do you want?” he said in sudden desperation.
Shaa, who had allowed his eyebrow to drop, raised it again. “You present a matter for curiosity, and potential professional interest. How far behind you do you think your pursuers actually were, by the way?”
“You’re holding me for the Guard, aren’t you,” the boy said, his attempt at a snarl emerging as more of a whine.
Shaa spread his hands. “I understand a certain need for caution, especially with your condition, but let’s not get ridiculous. If I had wanted to turn you over to the Guard, or anyone else for that matter, the difficulty would have been minimal.”
“I don’t know you and I don’t need you. I’m getting out of here.”
“Be my guest. Perhaps you actually did lose them.”
The kid hesitated, then rose. “On the other hand,” Shaa said, “perhaps you didn’t.” Shaa glared up at him. The kid plopped down. “Sir,” Shaa went on, “may I note that this is getting us nowhere.”
The kid leaned over the table and hissed, “All right, you. I need a sorcerer. Are you a sorcerer?”
“No,” Shaa drawled, extracting the vowel as slowly if it were a recalcitrant tooth, although “Not at the moment” would have been more precise. “In any case, I doubt that’s exactly what you need; magicians tend to be overrated. What’s your name?”
“Jurtan. Jurtan Mont.” The kid suddenly sounded exhausted. He had had enough fortitude to keep it back thus far, though. Perhaps he had potential. “Are you from around here, Mr. Shaa?”
“Shaa will do. I pass through every now and then.” He signalled the owner, raised two fingers. “Do you drink?” Shaa said as an afterthought, as the man scuttled back to his kegs and splashed froth.
“Uh … yeah, yeah sure.”
“You should try it, my first prescription. A modest dose of alcohol may reduce the frequency of your attacks.”
“My attacks? What are you talking about - what do you know about -”
“Alcohol changes the level of irritability of the central nervous system,” Shaa said. The owner dropped the drinks on the table, sloshing the contents of Shaa’s over the lip of the mug. Shaa moved to the left along his bench, avoiding a runoff channel. “Drink up.”
Jurtan Mont took up one mug, looking suspiciously at it.
“You’re sure this is healthy?”
Shaa peered over the rim of his own mug, sniffed. “You have a point. Still, you are on the run, so by definition you need every possible advantage you can get.”
Mont’s face tightened and turned a sudden white. “I know what I’m doing, I don’t need you to insult me.”
Shaa looked up at the ceiling, silently asking the universe if it knew quite what it was doing this time. “Look, my putative friend, I have much of value to offer, and I am offering it, provisionally, for free, so if you would please stop trying to find -”
Jurtan Mont swung his mug and tossed the contents at Shaa’s face. Shaa, demonstrating a level of agility not expected from his generally stocky frame, flipped himself off the bench, did a backward somersault, and fetched up with his neck wedged against the bar, avoiding most of the flying ale. “I don’t need you and I don’t want you,” Mont said again, and stalked toward the door. He kicked it open, walked two steps through it, and went slack. The trio of paddlers was still thomping away across the street.
A chorus of cries and the tumult of running feet burst from the left side out of view down the block. Shaa staggered to his feet. A small band of rapidly charging men appeared in the leftmost windows. Swearing under his breath, Shaa ran through the bar toward the collapsing Mont. The lead Guardsman shouted, “There, there he is! It’s him!” with his arm out pointing at Mont.
Behind him were more soldiers, a whole troop in fact.
Without stopping, Shaa grabbed a mug from the last table and hurled it as he slid through the doorway. The mug flew past Mont’s ear and shattered against the nose of the first soldier. Shaa skidded to a stop as the rest of the platoon converged on the bar, snagged the back of Mont’s collar, and heaved. Mont’s feet left the pavement, he flew parabolically backward through the doorway into the Bilious Gnome, and as he fell to the floor Shaa let go of his collar, slammed the door, and overturned the closest table in front of it.
Glass splintered. Shaa looked up and saw a Guardsman climbing through the remains of one of the oval front windows. The door heaved with a sound of creaking wood as it was hit by the weight of four strong men. Shaa looked around, then put his foot on the end of a bench and shoved. The bench slid across the floor and into the knee of the window-climbing Guardsman, who had just jumped to the floor. The knee folded sideways and the man fell against the wall. Shaa hoisted the semi-conscious Mont by his shirt and headed for the stairs.
“My window!” the tapster yelled. Then, “My other window, oh, gods, what next?”
“What indeed?” Shaa murmured. Mont took on his own weight and reeled up the stairs as three windows disgorged Guardsmen behind them. Shaa ran after him, hearing the front door disintegrate. Mont stopped at the top of the staircase and turned to look back. His mouth dropped open. Shaa swung an elbow at him, knocking him through the door leading off the landing, and then with his other hand withdrew a small membranous bladder from beneath his cloak. The bladder bulged and churned, its shimmering silver surface dancing with rainbow highlights like the skin of a fish. Shaa paused in the doorway, looking back at the five soldiers starting after him up the stairs, and grinned at them. He worked a fleshy valve on the bladder and carefully squirted a small stream of liquid onto the two beams holding the staircase to the wall. The liquid foamed, sizzled, and dug through the wood with astonishing speed. The staircase leaned over with a horrendous grinding screech, and then, with an even louder crack, it broke off, pivoted over, and hit the floor in one long THUDD! that shook the building, not to mention the soldiers who had been climbing it. A small noxious cloud hung in the air. Shaa bowed, stamped on the clutching fingers of the lead soldier, clinging desperately to the now-stairless sill, listened for the thump, and closed the door. “Fortunately they have yet to bring archers,” he said, clapped the dazed Mont on a shoulder, and sprinted down the hall.
Mont staggered after him. “What was that stuff you just used there?” he said.
The hall jogged off at an angle, and beyond the bend was the continuation of the staircase leading up to the third floor. “That ‘stuff’,” Shaa said, bounding up the steps, “was obtained at great cost and no little risk from a small amphibian resident in certain southern swamps.”
“Obtained? By you?”
“In fact, no.” Shaa reached the small landing at the top and saw the opening to a trap door in the ceiling above him. A beam slipped through a set of iron brackets held the trap closed. Shaa knelt, made a basket of his hands, caught Mont’s foot as he came off the last step, and pushed him into the air. “Wha?” Mont said.
“The beam, idiot. Push the beam.”
“Oh.” Mont heaved, dislodging the beam from the runners. The beam hit the floor on its end, narrowly missing Shaa’s foot, teetered, and crashed over. Mont pushed up, Shaa pushed Mont, and the trap door lifted slowly on wailing hinges. Then they heard pounding footsteps and renewed cries, but now from the second floor just below them.
“Grab hold,” Shaa shouted. He threw Mont upward through the opening, hearing a strangled yelp, bent, and seized the locking beam. A group of soldiers turned the corner below and trampled onto the steps. Shaa grunted and shoved the beam, the beam left the floor at the top of the stairs and flew downward, things were quiet for half-a-second, and then the air filled with wails and the sound of a vast crashing and bashing.
Shaa looked up. Mont had one leg over the trap door’s sill, and both arms. “I’m stuck,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” Shaa said. “It’s all a matter of attitude.” Mont strained and rolled over the edge onto the roof. “That’s much better,” Shaa continued approvingly. Mont’s face reappeared, and an outstretched arm next to it. Shaa jumped, caught the hand, and boosted himself out.
“Now what?” said Mont, panting.
Shaa let the trap door drop and surveyed the terrain.
They were on the roof of the Bilious Gnome’s building, a flat roof that sloped sharply down at the edges in a plane of shingles and rose here and there in a checkerboard of boxy rooms and platforms; the exit from the trap door was in the middle of one of the elevated platforms. The surrounding buildings were similar. “This way,” said Shaa. He broad-jumped across the gap to the next platform, took two running steps, and jumped again. Another leap brought him to the Bilious Gnome’s rear, overlooking an alley. The top floor of a four-story building confronted him across the alley, an unleapable gap up and away.
Mont joined him, much more cautiously. “If you don’t stop gritting your teeth,” Shaa told him, “your jaw will freeze up, making speech uncomfortable.” Shaa had produced a rope and small grapnel. He whirled it twice around his head and slung it across the alley.
“No,” Mont said, turning even whiter.
“The choice is yours,” said Shaa, irritated. The trap door they had left across the roof swung open with a clunk. The clamor of voices was again clearly audible, and did not sound at all pleased. Mont tugged on the rope. It was solid. Shaa braced his hold on the free end and gestured. Mont took a deep breath and a double handhold and swung out.
The Guard erupted out of the traphole, spotting Shaa immediately. Mont was halfway across. Shaa surveyed the distances, calculated rates of motion - a man with a bow appeared at the front of the soldiers. “Hold on!” Shaa yelled. He slapped a coil of rope around his waist, ran at the edge of the building, and dropped. An arrow streaked over his head, narrowly missing the tightening rope. Shaa swung out over the alley and hit the wall of the four-story building with both feet. The alley beneath was filling with troops. Shaa streaked up the rope, using all available feet and hands, pausing only to dislodge a large flowerpot from a convenient third-floor ledge, reached the roof, and flopped over the eave just ahead of a flight of arrows aimed fortuitously low. The roof was flat, and lacked Mont.
“Over here!” Mont yelled. Shaa spotted a waving arm on the next roof over, pulled the grapnel free as he passed it on the run, and vaulted over the edge. Mont caught him. “Why are you doing this?” Mont said.
Shaa found his feet and looked around. The next set of roofs went up and down, each a half-story different in height, like a long row of square sawteeth. “I need an adventure,” he said, launching himself at the next building.
“What?”
“There’s a curse,” Shaa said absently. “Come on.” He vanished over the edge.