Wild Magic

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About an hour after sundown on the Vungian festa on the night of the Moondark, a tall, bent old woman dressed in coarse gray trudged out of the Fahnatarr behind another, younger slave.

“Hsst.” Desantro tugged at Penhari’s sleeve. “Slow down,” she whispered, “‘tisn’t a race. Keep y’ head down. You forgetting everything.”

Penhari nodded, her enveloping cloak shifting against her shoulders as her head bobbed. She pulled the edges together again over the worn blouse and skirt Desantro had found for her. She was stifling in these layers of clothing, weighed down by everything she had„ stowed about her body, and she was sweating from excitement and an unfocused terror, her stomach knotting and burning.

The streets they hurried along were canyons between straight black walls of the Fundarim and Naostam tow-

ers, warrens that housed the Corasso poor, packed together in uneasy masses. The noise from the towers was partially muffled by the stone, but it fell on them like clubs as they went past.

“Is the city always this noisy?” Penhari murmured.

“Folk been moving off land, can’t crop it without water. We turn here.” Desantro tugged Penhari down a smaller side street. “Don’t want to get mixed with crowd at Sok Circle. Only place they c’n go is with their kin, so there’s two three times as many bodies shoved in there. That’s a rowdy crowd. At the Circle, I mean. During festal.’”

Penhari tugged the frayed veil so she could see through the uneven eyeholes. Desantro sounded wistful, as if she’d like to be there, plunged into the middle of that noise and motion.

She followed Desantro through turn after turn, sweat streaming off her.

In the beginning she hadn’t felt the weight of what she was carrying, gold coins packed into straps and wound around her legs, jewelry and more coins sewed into a thickly padded underskirt, the rolls of clothing and other items wrapped around her body, bulking out her lean Maulapam form, but after half an hour of walking, she was trembling and panting, hobbling along, moving by will alone, her knees creaking and her feet aching. All those years of sitting about with my feet up, they’re going to kill me yet.

Desantro stopped in the inky shadow at the side of a shuttered shop that fronted on Gate Street. “Hang on a moment,” she murmured. She gave Penhari a quick look-over, clicked her tongue. “You all right?”

“I’ll last, don’t worry. Why are we stopping?”

“There’re guards at the Gate. They don’t mess with people much, but y’ never know. Nobody coming ‘long Gate Street right now. We sh’d wait till there’s a bunch going out, hitch onto it. That’s the safest way.”

“Verna. “ Penhari sighed, eased her shoulders against the wall. “How long?”

Desantro listened. “Hear that? That’s a big mob coming. We gotta keep up with ’em. Can y’ do it?”

“I’ll do what I have to.” Brave words, I hope they’re not whistling at the moon. Abey’s Sting! If h fall on my face…

They left the side street and tagged after a laughing, dancing, teasing mob of young, newly-made Fundarim journeymen and a sprinkling of young women who were veiled after a fashion as a concession to the new rules, all of them noisily celebrating the the elevation of two of their members.

The mob reveled through the Gate, exchanging garbled shouts with guards leaning from the vigil windows of their turrets.

No one noticed the bulky gray figures hurrying along at the tail of that parade.

Desantro plunged into the Fringe, a maze of mud and stone houses plastered like mud-dauber nests on the waste land between the black basalt walls and the widening ring of mud at the edge of the Lake-ThatNever-Fails; there were no straight streets, only narrow, eccentrically wandering wynds between the shapeless structures.

Penhari labored behind her as long as she could, then collapsed against a crumbling mud wall; she tugged the veil off, let it drop beside her and gulped in mouthful after mouthful of the hot stinking air, whining and rasping, spots wheeling and vibrating before her eyes.

Desantro came rushing back, stood over her, said something.

Penhari couldn’t make out what she was saying, the blood was too loud in her ears. She managed to lift a hand, palm. out. “It’s ju…” Breath whistled out and her struggling lungs sucked in more. “Ju… hum=

ju… st… haaaaa… nee… eed… huuu

… catch… banana… breath!”

Desantro thrust a muscular shoulder under Penhari’s arm, pulled her away from the wall, and eased her down so she was sitting on the sun-baked soil. “Whew, that stuff must weigh a ton. Y’ shoulda said something.”

Penhari rolled her head back and forth, tried to smile. She lifted an arm that seemed to have turned to lead, tried to wipe away the sweat that was dripping into her eyes.

Desantro clicked tongue against teeth, felt around for the veil Penhari had discarded. She shook the dust off it, wiped gently at the older woman’s face. “Next time,” she said, “don’t be such an idiot. If you faint on me, what’n jannan am I s’posed to do?”

“Ve… ha… ma.”

“Good. You sit there a minute, make believe you a poor ol’ fat woman with no place t’ go. Here,” she wrung out the ragged veil, dropped it over Penhari’s head, “way it goes, y’ have t’ have this. Think poor, if y’ can, think I got nothing to lose so I don’t give a jegg what anyone do. There’s a jugshop a couple wynds over, I’m gonna get you some mulimuli, that’ll have y’ on y’ feet and dancing.” She tapped Penhari on the shoulder and went trotting off.

Penhari sat in the noisome dark, the noises of life loud and all around her, unseen but very much THERE. Murmurs. Laughter. Shouts. Screams. Howls and yowls. She was getting frightened, sitting there alone and out in the open. Desantro said be calm. Don’t give in t’ being afraid. Being afraid’s dangerous. But this was so strange, so unlike anything she’d ever experienced, she twitched at every sound. And the smell was terrible. Appalling. Nauseating. How people could live in this kind of squalor was something she couldn’t understand. It wouldn’t take all that much effort to sweep away the garbage rotting in piles around her. Why didn’t someone just do it? She cringed from the thought of what she was sitting on, what this dirt beneath her was made of, this hard crusty soil with not even a gesture at paving.

The tremors in her arms and legs were smoothing out and her breathing was steadying. She pulled her legs up and rested her head on arms she folded across her knees. Watching Desantro dance that day had wakened in her the sense that there was an immense ocean of life lapping against the walls of the Falmatarr but never coming inside. Now, suddenly, she was plunged into that life and finding it was one thing to dream of fleeing to freedom, but something else entirely to sit in the filth of this wynd with a stitch in her side and the shakes in every limb. I could go back. I could knock on the door and show my face and this would all be over. Hot bath, iced lemonade… Abey’s Sting, I’d grovel for a drink right now She closed her eyes and mentally wallowed in the comforts of her old life.

Reality catching up with me. What a choice. Famtoche’s fists or this kind of thing for the rest of my life. She lifted her head. “No!” she said aloud and startled a squat old woman picking her way along the wynd, dragging a canvas sack behind her; gray hair straggling about a greasy, lined faced hardly visible in the darkness, hands in knotted-string mitts, the old woman glanced briefly at her, dismissed her, and went on down the wynd.

“No,” Penhari whispered to herself. “No, I won’t end like you. I refuse the possibility. There must be some way…” She moved her head back, rested it against the wall, settling herself to wait.